Mexico has been prompted to accelerate its turn to renewable energy after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year prompted a sharp rise in global energy costs, Mexican Foreign Affairs Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said on Thursday.
Ebrard made the comments after taking dozens of foreign diplomats to see a massive new solar energy project near the US border.
“Mexico is making a really big effort because it didn’t consider (the switch to renewable energy and electric vehicles) would be so fast,” Ebrard said. The decisions made by the United States and Mexico over the past year to invest heavily in those areas “didn’t seem that close before the war.”
“We too have to change the focus,” he said. “It has to go faster.”
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In April, Mexico plans to power the first phase of a massive solar energy project near a beach town popular with tourists heading a short distance from the United States.
When completed, the entire $1.6 billion project will have a generating capacity of 1,000 megawatts, enough to power approximately 500,000 homes. It will be the largest solar project built by the Mexican state electricity company.
Aerial view of the northern border state of Sonora, where the state electric company is building the largest solar plant in all of Latin America, in Puerto Penasco, Sonora state, Mexico, February 2, 2023. Mexico is pushing to accelerate the switch to renewable energy in the country.
(Raquel Cunha/Pool photo via AP)
In Puerto Peñasco, near the top of the Gulf of California and the Arizona border, rows of solar arrays that tilt with the sun race toward the horizon hovering above the sand. The project will eventually cover 5,000 acres in the transition where the desert flattens out between the rugged brown mountains and the blue sea.
The Federal Electric Commission expects to have the project’s first 120 megawatts operational by April 29, Juan Antonio Fernández, the commission’s director of strategic planning, said Thursday.
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Sonora Governor Alfonso Durazo, who once served as a cabinet minister alongside Ebrard before running for state office, has argued that Sonora should be Mexico’s EV manufacturing center. In addition to upcoming solar power — a total of 5 gigawatts of solar capacity is planned for the state — Sonora has the largest known deposits of lithium in the country, a key component in electric vehicle batteries.
Ebrard said the plan represents a “new development model.”
“We’re not going to be able to do it in all states at the same time,” he said. “But we have to show that that idea can be real and it’s not wishful thinking.”
The move towards renewable energies runs counter to other priorities of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
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The president has invested heavily in supporting the long-struggling state oil company. He is building a large new oil refinery. And he has pushed through legislation that gives the state power company an advantage over private power generation, which in many cases was cleaner. He is the subject of a trade dispute with the United States and Canada.
Ebrard is one of several people seeking the presidential nomination of López Obrador’s Morena party for the 2024 national election.
