Ramon Mendez-Galain

speaker

85 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 17 Jul

Ramon Mendez-Galain’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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TED Radio Hour · Searching for paradise · 17 Jul 2026 podcast

The very first one was a very small solar farm of only two hectares.

This means it was only about one megawatt, almost nothing.

It's very close to the largest hydropower plant in the country.

And it has a very beautiful park surrounding the dams.

And I thought it was a very symbolic thing to have because hydropower is the best of our country.

and the future is solar.

In just five years, we went from an almost completely decarbonized one that already in 2017 was 98% renewable.

What makes Uruguayan cage unique is that almost half of that electricity is obtained from non-traditional renewable sources, wind, solar, and sustainable biomass.

Wind alone can produce up to 40% of the total electricity consumed in the country in a year, a percentage comparable to the other world wind champion, Denmark.

But also, 15 or even 20% of our electricity is obtained with sustainable biomass.

Of course, none of this was easy.

We have to innovate.

We have to understand that such a power system requires

they're planning an operation quite different than the traditional one.

Our academics worked for years to design a groundbreaking software to handle energy dispatch specifically designed to manage intermittent sources, such as wind and solar, but also how to use water.

This allows us, for example, to have a prediction of the amount of wind electricity and solar electricity that we're going to have in the grid with a week in advance.

And this also allows us to know how and when we have to use water from the dams.

Well, the message is very simple.

The message is, first, there is a solution right now, which is the best solution at a national level.

There is a solution which creates jobs, which reduces costs, which makes you independent of fluctuation of the prices of energy commodities.

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