Uploaded on 2017-10-31 by Maria Alejandra López

1. What are the dominant fossil fuels used in your country? The dominant fossil fuels used in Colombia are oil, natural gas and coal. This are the main sources of energy without counting with the hydro production that works in different places of the country, which is an important source of electricity for all the final consumers, because it provides the 70% of the energy of the country, approximately. 2. Where are the dominant fossil fuels mainly used for in your country? (e.g. transport, industry, non-energy use etc.) In Colombia, the oil production is mainly used in transport and other uses, but the bulk of it is exported. From its initial 2193.70 PJ, only 593.00 PJ go to the refineries. The coal production is mainly exported, starts with 2328.10 PJ, and only 168.1 PJ are used by industry and other uses, all the rest is exported. The natural gas production has a big input to power stations to generate electricity for final consumers, but the bulk of it goes to industry, transport and other uses. In conclusion, the transport is the biggest consumer with 420.40 PJ, then other uses with 352.30 PJ, next is the industry with 296.10 PJ and finally the non-energy use with a total of 17.50 PJ. 3. It is your task to create a new policy in order to improve the environmental friendly and sustainable sources and consumption of energy of your country. How would you do that? Think of how you can improve the sources and the consumption of energy. Colombia has a great potential because of the geographical position in the equatorial zone, which allows constant solar radiation in certain areas of the country like Magdalena, San Andres, Providencia and La Guajira Peninsula, which makes it a privileged country to use solar energy. Colombia’s average radiation is 4.5 kWh/m2. The best solar resource area is La Guajira peninsula, with 6 kWh/m2 of radiation, this same area is among the best in South America according to the wind regime, that has been classified with class 7 winds (over 10 meters per second, m/s). Knowing this information, I would start my policy with the sources of energy, improving these environmentally friendly and sustainable sources of energy, by allowing larger areas to implement the use of solar energy through solar panels with this high radiation that can be captured through almost the entire year. In the same way, I would invest in the installation of more power stations to collect the wind power and increasingly get to the grand potential that this area has to collect energy, that is about 20.000 megawatts, which right now has an installed capacity of 19.5 MW of wind energy, tapping only 0.4% of its theoretical wind potential, that can easily generate sufficient power to meet the national demand almost twice over. After setting this initial policy, I would invest in quality energy systems, to provide a good and safe storage of this energy and then distribute it all around the country, having some controls over the consumption of it. Primarily, invest on electric vehicles and hybrid buses, can reduce the CO2 emissions, if this is applied just starting with the public transportation in the cities, this can improve de quality of air and pollution for citizen, making the public transportation energy-efficient. As well as in industry, changing energy markets and energy politics further increase regulation and cost pressures on industry. Also is important to promote the use of LED lighting along the cities of the country to reduce costs for each city and people in their own homes. The important thing and the key to success is to encourage people to be more conscious about their daily waste of energy, with simple things like turning lights off and improving the incidence of natural light, wind and comfort in buildings and housing. Also is important to promote the use of LED lighting to reduce cost for the city and people in their own homes. The image attached is a photo from an airplane over France, as an example of how the power stations are located at the top of the mountains to collect the most of the wind power and supply the energy to their surroundings, a completely different area compared to La Guajira in Colombia, that is next to the sea and is a very arid zone. This shows that the mountains in Colombia that go along the country from north to south, can also be a good place to install a capacity for wind power and have a more distributed system of Eolic energy all around the country.