With help from Scotland’s marine power expertise, Chile may be on course for a dramatic reversal in its energy fortunes

Historically, Chile has imported the majority of its energy at great cost to its poorest citizens. Chileans in remote communities which rely on diesel generators for their electricity supply pay more than twice the amount per kilowatt hour than people do in the UK. They pay as much as 35p/kwh while UK customers are currently paying an average of 14p/kwh.

“Chile is the second least self-sufficient country in Latin America after Panama, and currently imports 75% of its energy resources,” says Christoph Tagwerker, a consultant at Inter-American Development Bank.



Access to drinking water is also a problem. Chileans in isolated communities are reliant on tankers for delivering water, which is costly. Settlements in the north of Chile (Norte Grande, Norte Chico) and in the far south (Aysen, Magallenes and Chile’s off shore islands) could all benefit from desalination projects that turn sea water into drinking water – if they had a cheap source of electricity to power these projects.

But with a little help from Scotland, Chile may be on course to make a dramatic reversal in its energy fortunes. Experts in Scotland think that renewable energy from the sea – wave and tidal energy – could provide cheap electricity to Chile’s remote communities and be used to power desalination and water pumping.

Gareth Davies is managing director of Aquatera, a Scottish renewable energy consultancy with many years of experience in marine energy. “In terms of wave-energy resource Chile is one of the richest, if not the richest countries in the world,” he says. “It’s coastline receives more wave energy than any other country in the world.” The total available wave resource in Chile is estimated to be 240 gigawatts – 10 times more electricity than it currently uses.

Theoretically, Chile has enough resources to become an energy exporter. At some point in the future, when a cost-effective way of transporting energy long distance has been found.

It’s still early days, but the Chilean government has awarded the contract to launch a centre of excellence in marine energy and pilot schemes are expected to be launched soon.



Aquatera has been working to develop marine energy in Chile for six years, and Davies wants Chile to benefit from Scotland’s experience, leapfrogging some of the mistakes they made.

“Scotland didn’t focus on the need to develop grids, ports and the supply chain technology,” he says. “We didn’t realise how important [associated infrastructure] was. It’s been left to the supply chain and local authorities to make those things happen.”

The situation in Chile is slightly different as its energy markets are local rather than national. From a geographical perspective this is entirely logical; Chile is a long strip of a country, running down the west coast of South America, between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes. It ranges from hot desert in the north, to freezing lands in the south, and in between there are fjords, opens coasts and offshore islands. Each of those regions presents different opportunities for energy generation and different markets for energy supply.



The electricity grid in Chile is patchy; it has a little bit of solar here, some conventional power plants there, and thousands of people in remote areas completely dependent on expensive shipments of diesel, which they use to power small-scale generators.



It makes far more sense to bring the energy on land from the coast to the towns on a longitudinal basis – rather than trying to bring it in at one point and run it through a national grid to inaccessible places.



Davies says that Chile is well-equipped with the skills needed to implement a marine energy strategy:

“Chile is leading the way economically in South America. It’s got a tradition of shipbuilding, of fishing, of aquaculture; it’s got an extensive electro-engineering network and a huge tradition of mining. Those industries provide a skills base that is equal or better than others in terms of the deployment of technology.”

Davies adds that the country is attractive to investors: “Lots of people inside and outside Chile are interested in it as an investment location because of its strong economic performance.”



A report by Aquatera for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office says that marine energy will be as cheap as most other forms of energy in Chile by 2020, and that it is already – even in these very early days – on a par with the price people are paying for diesel electricity in the remote areas.

There are commercial markets that are already viable and prices always come down once a technology is implemented on a larger scale. Now it’s just a matter of getting on with it.

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