Seeking to improve understanding, communication, and cooperation between Mexico and the United States by promoting original research, encouraging public discussion, and proposing policy options for enhancing the bilateral relationship.
04/12/2021
Source: The Los Angeles Times
SABINAS, Mexico — Juan Manuel Briones was 14 when he started working in the coal mines in this remote stretch of northern Mexico.
He toiled underground for nearly two decades, only to be laid off a few years ago as Mexico began embracing renewable energy and weaning itself off fossil fuels.
11/29/19 – Bloomberg
By Justin Villamil
Mexico’s clean energy industry was handed a big win on Thursday after a federal court reversed an earlier decision on a renewable credits rule change that critics said would have been damaging to the sector.
After clean energy companies, including American power generator AES Corp. and Italian utility giant Enel SpA, filed for injunctions in courts across Mexico, a federal judge in Mexico City reversed a lower court decision of the rule change on Thursday, according to people familiar with the case who asked not to be identified as the information isn’t public.
11/01/19 – Reuters
by Oscar Lopez
On the same September day that activist Greta Thurnberg gave a fiery speech in New York demanding world leaders tackle climate change, Mexico’s president was touting achievements of a wholly different kind: increasing funding for oil production.
“We’re investing in refineries. It hasn’t been done for a long time,” President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told reporters at a news conference in Mexico City.
10/01/19 – San Antonio Business Journal
By Jessica Corso
The San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce is leading a trade mission to Mexico City that began Sunday evening and returns to the city on Wednesday. Joining Chamber President Diane Sánchez will be San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg, Texas Secretary of State Ruth Hughes and leaders from 25 San Antonio companies.
One of those leaders is EPIcenter CEO Kimberly Britton, who called the trade mission an opportunity to build relationships with her Mexican counterparts and to figure out what’s going on in the Mexican energy industry now that Andrés Manual Lopéz Obrador is president. Obrador recently ended a dispute with several pipeline operators, allowing them to send natural gas to Mexico.
08/30/18 Reuters
Energy from the ocean breakers that pound Mexico’s Pacific Coast could soon be turned into electricity as an Israeli joint venture finalizes permits and financing for the country’s first wave energy plant.
Wave power development has long lagged renewable rivals such as solar, but Eco Wave Power says it could prove an effective way to deliver power to coastal communities in countries such as Ghana or Kenya that have little access to electricity.
“The ocean is the biggest renewable resource that we have and it’s completely untapped, and it has to change,” said Inna Braverman, co-founder of Tel Aviv-based Eco Wave Power.
“At the moment we’re a comparable price to solar, but the advantage on top of solar is the availability of the resource… It keeps working 24/7,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
02/26/2018 Sun&Wind Energy
Ingeteam, an independent global supplier of electrical conversion and turbine control equipment, announced today that it has been awarded a substantial contract by leading Mexican renewable energy developer Zuma Energía to provide a state-of-the-art control center for its operational wind farm in Oaxaca, PE Ingenio. The platform will collect all the relevant information on the infrastructure of the wind farms in real time, enabling the operator to effectively manage and optimize the operation and maintenance of its wind turbines.
The control center will be the cornerstone of Zuma’s asset performance management. It will allow them to gather and analyze a vast array of essential operating data, not only on the wind turbines and substations, but also on the electricity market and the variations of meteorological conditions. The control systems collect the continuous stream of information that each wind turbine generates every second. All key condition parameters, such as temperatures, vibrations, operating conditions and alarms are monitored and stored in “Big Data” databases optimized to work with large volumes of data in real time in a scalable way. The Control Center will be located in the offices of Zuma Energía in Mexico City.
09/29/2016 The Wall Street Journal
MEXICO CITY—Mexico’s opening of its electricity market after decades of state control is driving fierce competition among suppliers of clean energy and pushing prices down, as renewable energies gain traction across Latin America.
Mexico’s government, following the launch this year of a wholesale electricity market under an independent system operator, this year held its first auctions in which companies made bids to sell renewable energy under long-term contracts to state-owned utility Comisión Federal de Electricidad, or CFE, starting in 2018.
07/26/16 The New York Times
LA VENTOSA, Mexico — At night, Juan Piñeda López hears the hum of a wind turbine that churns 300 yards away from his adobe house. Sometimes he catches the stench of lubricant that spews down the turbine’s mast.
Beyond that, Mr. Piñeda said, the forest of turbines that has sprung up on the plains here in the southern state of Oaxaca in recent years barely affects him.
And that is the problem.
By Stephanie Friede
Wind energy is closely related to a myriad number of pressing social, political, and economic concerns. “Mexico has already set ambitious targets for renewable energy, stipulating that green power must make up 35 percent of the country’s generation by 2026,” reported The Financial Times in late 2014. However, it was only in 2009 that the industry itself began to pick up speed. As one report explained that year, “After years of spinning wheels, renewables in Mexico are ready to forge ahead.” Former President Felipe Calderón, two years into his six-year term, positioned his own political legacy firmly alongside the future of renewable energy. While prior to 2006, the renewable energy industry was at a standstill “aside from large hydropower construction,” it was with the backing of Calderón that the industry really picked up steam. Impediments to growth included the “federal power utility” the Comisión Federal de Electricidad which translates as the Federal Electricity Commission (hereafter will be referenced by its Spanish acronym CFE) which “seemed less than interested in competition from independent power producers, such as wind farms,” as well as a “renewable energy law” that “lingered in the national assembly for more than three years…leaving the country without a comprehensive legal framework to encourage renewables investment.”
Today, wind energy technology has evolved. The Mexican wind energy sector is expanding with parks popping up across the country. While many see the growth of wind energy as the inevitable next step in a progressive approach to green economic development, it will only succeed if and when the social and the natural landscapes of new projects are considered in concert. This paper is a case study in the social and historical context of wind energy development in southern Mexico. The paper argues that wind energy on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec has produced far more than mere electricity. Like other kinds of large-scale energy or infrastructure projects, the arrival of wind turbines also brings worldviews into conversation. Windenergy projects and developers identify nature as a resource for human use while many residents of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec see their windy world through quite a different lens. While difficult to pin-down, istmeños have engaged with the land in productive partnership that carries with both their history and spiritual qualities. In order to dispel current tensions and rectify mistakes made in the path forward, a critical rethinking of this kind of sustainable development is urgently needed.
12/14/2015 Clean Technica
Spanish wind turbine manufacturer Gamesa has been awarded a contract to build a 130 MW wind farm in Mexico.
The project is being built under a turnkey arrangement — allowing it to be sold on as a completed project upon completion. Gamesa was contracted to deliver 65 of its G114-2.0 MW wind turbines to developers Mexico Power Group and First Reserve for the construction of La Bufa, set to be located in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, in Central Mexico.
Gamesa is set to deliver the turbines and commission construction within 2016, and will also provide operation and maintenance services over a long-term span of the wind farm’s operation. Upon completion of the project, the electricity generated by the wind farm will be supplied exclusively to Volkswagen’s factories in the nearby cities of Puebla and Silao.
According to Gamesa’s press release announcing the award of the contract, the company has installed over 1,700 MW in Mexico as an original equipment manufacturer (OEM), and another 700 MW as its own wind farm developer — with a sizable pipeline to boot. These stats place Gamesa as the number one OEM in the market, and has led to the company announcing that it will build a wind tower factory in the state of Tamaulipas in a joint venture through Windar Renovables with the Daniel Alonso Group.
