Mexico was pushed to accelerate its turn toward renewable energy after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year drove a sharp increase in global energy costs, Mexico Foreign Affairs Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said late Thursday.
Ebrard made the comments after taking dozens of foreign diplomats to see a massive new solar energy project near the U.S. border.
“Mexico is making a really great effort because it didn’t consider (the shift to renewable energy and electric vehicles) would be so fast,” Ebrard said. The decisions made by the United States and Mexico in the past year to invest heavily in those areas “didn’t appear so near before the war.”
“We too have to change the focus,” he said. “It has to go faster.”
In April, Mexico plans to power up the first phase of a huge solar energy project near a beach town popular with tourists making the short drive from the United States.
Once completed, the full $1.6 billion project will have a generating capacity of 1,000 megawatts — enough to power some 500,000 homes. It will be the largest solar project built by Mexico’s state-owned electric company.
In Puerto Peñasco, near the top of the Gulf of California and border with Arizona, rows of solar panels that tilt with the passing sun run off to the horizon hovering above the sand. The project will eventually cover 5,000 acres in the transition where the desert flattens between the rugged brown mountains and blue sea.
The Federal Electric Commission plans to have the first 120 megawatts of the project operational by April 29, Juan Antonio Fernández, the commission’s strategic planning director, said Thursday. (ABC)