One country turned off politics-as-usual and switched on wind turbines instead — and it never looked back.
Uruguay just closed out 2025 running 98% of its electricity on renewables.
No oil giants. No sloganeering. Just two decades of quiet, boring, brilliant policy.
Here's the twist nobody expected:
It wasn't a tech breakthrough.
It was a political handshake.
No oil reserves.
Regular blackouts.
A grid running on imported fuel and prayer.
Then physicist Ramón Méndez Galaín got appointed energy chief — and had a full plan on the table in five months.
The next president, José Mujica, could've torn it up. He had the majority to do it.
Instead he did something almost unheard of in politics:
He got every party to agree to protect the plan, no matter who won next.
"Governments pass, and people remain," he said.
No subsidies. No cheap loans.
So Méndez flipped the script:
Investors got certainty. The state got power. Nobody needed a bailout.
And the economy? It grew richer per unit of fuel burned — output per kg of oil equivalent jumped from $12.3 to $19.5 in fifteen years.
That momentum pulled in roughly $6 billion in investment, around 12% of GDP, and created some 50,000 jobs along the way.
As generation costs fell, some power companies got squeezed on those old fixed contracts — and the bill landed on consumers.
Uruguay is also leaning harder on Chinese supply chains for turbines and EVs, a dependency that could get politically messy fast.
Still, the real lesson isn't about turbines or subsidies.
It's this: Uruguay locked in politics before it locked in contracts.
Every other country trying to go green should be taking notes.
That's all for now!
