Energy
Electricity generation in Argentina totaled 122.3 billion Kwh in 2009, and consumption, 123.3 billion Kwh in 2011. The electricity sector in Argentina constitutes the third largest power market in Latin America. It relies mostly on natural gas power generation (51%), hydroelectricity (28%), and oil-fired generation (12%). Reserves of shale gas and oil in the Vaca Muerta oil field and elsewhere are estimated to be the world's third-largest.
The first of the country's three nuclear reactors was inaugurated in 1974, and nuclear power generated 7% of the total in 2009. New renewable energy technologies are barely exploited, however, and the country still has a large untapped hydroelectric potential. Wind energy is the fastest growing among new renewable sources. Fifteen wind farms have been developed since 1994 in Argentina, the only country in the region to produce wind turbines. The 55 MW of installed capacity in these in 2010 will increase by 895 MW upon the completion of new wind farms begun that year.
Faced with rising electricity demand (over 5% annually) and declining reserve margins, the government of Argentina is in the process of commissioning large projects, both in the generation and transmission sectors. To keep up with rising demand, it is estimated that about 1,000 MW of new generation capacity are needed each year. An important number of these projects are being financed by the government through trust funds, while independent private initiative is still limited as it has not fully recovered yet from the effects of the Argentine economic crisis.
The electricity sector was unbundled in generation, transmission and distribution by the reforms carried out in the early 1990s. Generation occurs in a competitive and mostly liberalized market in which 75% of the generation capacity is owned by private utilities. In contrast, the transmission and distribution sectors are highly regulated and much less competitive than generation.
Read more about this topic: Economy Of Argentina
Famous quotes containing the word energy:
“Viewed narrowly, all life is universal hunger and an expression of energy associated with it.”
—Mary Ritter Beard (1876–1958)
“I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)
“After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. The new kings of the world will live tranquilly for a long time, confining themselves to devouring each other and being parasites among each other on a cottage industry scale.”
—Primo Levi (1919–1987)