Credit: Amanda Aronczyk / NPR
Back in 2007, Uruguay had a massive problem with no obvious fix. The economy of this country of 3.5 million people was growing, but there wasn’t enough energy to power all that growth. There was energy rationing, and people’s power bills kept going up.
“It was difficult for us to cope,” Ramón Méndez Galain remembers. “It was difficult to get electricity. For some time, we were beginning to have blackouts.”
Méndez Galain had trained as a particle physicist. “When you are trained as a scientist,” he says, “you are trained to see an unsolved problem, and [to try] to find an explanation and a solution. So I used, if you wish, my scientific skills I had developed in order to face this difficulty with the same strategy.”
He […]
An excellent article and wonderful. Shows, what can be done with outside the box thinking.
Uruguay has had enlightened leadership for some time. Easier to do than in a nation as big as the US. We have the science, the ability to do this transition, but we are and have been more heavily invested in and controlled by fossil companies. Companies that provided stock profits to many. Wall St. is dragging its feet.And, of course there are the Middle East nations whose main profit come from fossil fuels. And those countries, like Saudi Arabia, share petroleum profits with their citizens. There are companies in the ME who’ve begun to invest in solar, but it’s taking a while..