The mexican economy would lose three billion dollars a year on investments from wind power if the controversy is approved Electrical Reform of the president, Andrew Manuel Lopez Obradorwarned on Tuesday the Global Wind Energy Council (GWECby its acronym in English).
If the reform prospers and this level of investment cannot be deployed, what is going to happen is that Mexico is going to lose at least 3,000 million dollars in terms of wind energy investments in its GDP,” the director for Latin America of the GWEC, Ramon Fiestas.
To this amount, we must add the investments in the photovoltaic sector, so the figure for lost investment could amount to between five and six billion dollars a year, said Fiestas.
The representative of the sector lamented that Mexico was one of the leaders in the region before 2018, when López Obrador assumed the Presidency and hindered private renewable energy projects, which are now led by Brazil and Colombia in the region.
Mexico is away from world trends in terms of the regeneration of the energy matrix and the modernization of its electrical system to provide its consumers with cheap and clean energy”, he observed.
The GWEC announced this Tuesday the face-to-face return of the fair México Windpowerwhich will bring together 45 companies from the sector on March 23 and 24 in Mexico City.
The Mexican Legislature is pending the analysis and vote on the López Obrador reform, which calls for limiting private participation in electricity generation to 46 percent and prioritizing the dispatch of fossil fuel plants from the Federal electricity commission (CFE), the state company.
The Government promotes the reform despite the private projects that now represent an accumulated investment of 12,500 million dollars, said Leopoldo Rodríguez, president of the Mexican Wind Energy Association (Amdee), which represents the sector.
This investment represents up to 3 times more than the CFE’s budget, he commented.
The state company allocates almost three times more to natural gas than to renewable energy, and the new projects announced by the government will require between 60 and 80 percent more natural gas, Rodríguez warned.
“We are going to move away from this objective, also very laudable and that we all want, of having energy sovereignty, we are going to depend more on natural gas that we do not have,” he said.
To reach its clean energy goals, Mexico would have to invest $38 billion to add 23,000 megawatts of clean capacity between 2022 and 2030, 17 times the 1,350 megawatts the CFE now has from these sources, according to Amdee.
Only 29 percent of the energy in Mexico is produced with clean sources, Rodríguez added.
For this reason, he regretted that the reform hinders private investment in renewable energy, which now has more than seven thousand megawatts of installed capacity, 9 percent of the national total from any source.
With information from EFE