This is vital information that I hope will be helpful in the upcoming 2026 NYS legislative session.
Uruguay's story of how this small South American country successfully transitioned its electric grid to be almost completely powered by renewable energy, could be a good model for NY and provide evidence that it is achievable in as little as one and a half decades if the political will and needed policies are put in place.
NY is a wealthy state and has no valid excuse for not being further along in transitioning to renewable energy, especially since it enacted its climate law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) in 2019 and stated it was going to move toward renewable energy many years (1.5 decades) before enacting the CLCPA.
Key Milestones in NY's Renewable Goals:
2004: Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS): Mandated 25% renewable energy by 2013, setting the initial push for clean energy.
2016: "50 by '30" Goal: The Public Service Commission (PSC) ordered a Clean Energy Standard (CES) to achieve 50% renewable electricity by 2030, building on earlier efforts. (I note that NY's current trend from NYISO 2024 Power Trends report, graph on page 51, implies we will be 30 years late on even this modest goal.)
2019: Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA): A landmark law establishing ambitious statewide goals:
70% Renewable Electricity by 2030. (I note that NY's current trend from graph on page 51 of NYISO 2024 Power Trends report, implies we will be 70 years late unless NY speeds up to go 15X faster.)
100% Zero-Emission Electricity by 2040.
Uruguay has a population of 3.4 million, almost no fossil fuel resources, but significant hydropower (50% of elect generated) and it developed good wind (about 40% of elect generated) & solar power resources in just one and a half decades, with 50,000 jobs created by the transition to 98% renewable electricity, while its poverty rate dropped from 40% to just 10%.
Excerpts and articles about Uruguay's transition are below. As the first article says, Uruguay completely avoided nuclear power!
In 2005, oil made up 55% of Uruguay’s total energy supply, and residents still experienced blackouts and energy rationing.
“In dry years…cost overruns could be as high as $1 billion. And for a small economy like Uruguay, this is 2% of GDP”, Mendéz explained in an interview with NPR in November 2023.'
Generating 98% of its electricity from renewable sources, Uruguay’s rapid adoption and expansion of sustainable sources of energy has been lauded internationally as a model for transitioning national power systems away from fossil fuels.
Avoiding nuclear power entirely, Uruguay first embraced wind turbines as a source of cheap, reliable power; providing 40% of the country’s capacity in less than a decade. It then expanded its solar and biomass capacity to an almost fully decarbonized mix of energy sources, joining a very short list of high-income countries producing over 90% of their energy needs with low-carbon sources – including Iceland, Sweden, and France. Once a net importer of energy, Uruguay now exports its surplus energy to neighbouring Brazil and Argentina.
In less than two decades, Uruguay broke free of its dependence on oil imports and carbon emitting power generation, transitioning to renewable energy that is owned by the state but with infrastructure paid for by private investment. Can such a feat be replicated elsewhere?
Uruguay has significantly reduced its carbon footprint and nurtured domestic development that is credited with reducing poverty rates from 40% to 10% in less than two decades.
The Uruguay Way is a framework of laws, regulations, institutional support, and consensus building.
The above excerpts are from the Earth.org article, published Feb 2024, at this link: https://earth.org/the-uruguay-way-achieving-energy-sovereignty-in-the-developing-world/
Additional excerpts/articles about Uruguay's swift transition to renewable energy:
Uruguay did what most nations still call impossible: it built a power grid that runs almost entirely on renewables—at half the cost of fossil fuels. The physicist who led that transformation says the same playbook could work anywhere—if governments have the courage to change the rules.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2025/10/19/uruguays-renewable-charge-a-small-nation-a-big-lesson-for-the-world/
Just 17 years ago, Uruguay used fossil fuels for a third of its energy generation, according to the World Resources Institute.
Today, only 2% of the electricity consumed in Uruguay is generated from fossil sources. The country’s thermal power plants rarely need to be activated, except when natural resources are insufficient.
Half of Uruguay’s electricity is generated in the country’s dams [hydropower], and 10% percent comes from agricultural and industrial waste and the sun. But wind, at 38%, is the main protagonist of the revolution in the electrical grid.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/12/uruguay-pioneer-in-renewable-energy-a-model-for-the-world/
[President] Vázquez needed rapid solutions. He turned to an unlikely source: Ramón Méndez Galain, a physicist who would transform the country’s energy grid into one of the cleanest in the world.
“I had been working abroad for 14 years, and when I came back, there was this energy crisis, but the only solution people were giving was to install a nuclear power plant – that was it,” Galain remembers. “I was a nuclear physicist, so I thought I could understand a little about this problem.”
The more Galain researched the issue, the more he became convinced that nuclear power was not the answer for Uruguay. Instead, he argued, it was renewables. He published his findings in a paper that laid out his belief that the country should go all in on wind power. Soon after, he received a phone call inviting him to become Uruguay’s energy secretary and to implement his plan.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/dec/27/uruguays-green-power-revolution-rapid-shift-to-wind-shows-the-world-how-its-done?CMP=share_btn_url
He [Méndez Galain] started researching different potential paths for Uruguay's energy future and reaching out to experts he knew around the world. Ultimately, he wrote up an entire plan for how Uruguay could change its energy mix so that it relied almost entirely on renewable energy. There would be less pollution, it would be better for the climate, and, he thought, in the long run, it would be the most economical choice Uruguay could make.
private companies would be in charge of setting up and maintaining the wind turbines that would power Uruguay's grid, while the public utility would continue to distribute that energy to its customers
His scheme had the built-in advantage of pushing the billions of dollars in upfront cost to construct all those wind turbines onto the private companies. In exchange, the public utility would agree to buy all the energy those turbines produced at a set rate for 20 years.
"Investors need to have the security that their investment will be paid back," explains Méndez Galain, "and for that they need a certain amount of time."
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/06/1197954251/uruguay-green-energy-carbon-emissions-climate-change
SUGGESTED ACTION
Please contact the Governor, your New York State Senator and Assemblymember, to urge them to take lessons from Uruguay and California, both of which are much further along in transitioning to renewable energy, and ask them to take urgent, appropriate scale actions to make New York State a real climate leader. Cleaner air, cleaner water, better health, energy savings, more good jobs, environmental justice and a better economy will be the reward.
Author Valdi Weiderpass