Central America: Tremendous Potential for Geothermal Energy in Region

Geothermal – a Key Source of Clean Energy in Central America (Inter Press Service)

The Ahuachapán Geothermal Plant in El Salvador, with an installed capacity of 204 MW. This Central American country is second in the world, after Iceland, with respect to the share of geothermal energy in the energy mix: 25 per cent of the total. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Energy from the depths of the earth – geothermal – is destined to fuel renewable power generation in Central America, a region with great potential in this field.

“Volcanoes have always been a menace to humanity but now in El Salvador they are a resource to generate clean, renewable and cheap energy. Now they represent the future of our nations,” said David López, president of the government’s Lempa River Executive Hydropower Commission, in a regional workshop on geothermal energy.

Given the environmental vulnerability of Central America and the impacts that climate change is already causing, with phenomena such as increasingly long droughts, it is vital for the region to depend less on hydropower generation and to make greater efforts to develop other options, geologist Leonardo Solís, from the state Costa Rican Institute of Electricity, told IPS.

“If there are climate variations, droughts, etc., how do we compensate? We have to say that geothermal energy is an excellent complement to other energies,” he said, during a visit to the Ahuachapán Plant, one of the two geothermal plants in El Salvador, as part of the activities on clean energies in the area.

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