Costa Rica is looking to reach 300 days of running in clean energy breaking the mark of 271 days the country achieved during 2015 and 2016.

The weather conditions during the first semester of the year and the new energy generation plants will allow the country to surpass its goal of producing energy from 100% renewable sources.

In the first five months of this year bunker plants have been used only 21 days, “We should be able to surpass the previous numbers because we are more than half way through the year and we already accumulate 143 days without using thermal energy plants and we have left the most rainy months when we usually don’t use this source of energy,” said Javier Orozco, Electric planning and developing director of the Costa Rica Electric Institute (ICE).

The recent incorporation of two new wind energy plants also represent an increase in the sources of clean energy used. The capacity of producing wind energy went from 70 megawatts in 2007 to 382 megawatts in 2017.

The inauguration of the Reventazón hydroelectric plant contributes with 305 megawatts of power.

“There’s no doubt that Reventazón is the source that can contribute the most with reaching this goal, because it is the biggest of all of them and because it has its own reservoir an important element in the generation of electricity, but all of them contribute”, explained Orozco in an interview with local newspaper La República.

Out of the five sources of clean energy the national electric system has (hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, solar and biomass) the hydroelectric source continues to be the main renewable energy motor for the country, followed by geothermal, wind, biomass and solar in the last position.