The president of Colombia, Iván Duque, inaugurated this Friday the Guajira 1 Wind Farm, the largest in the country, built by the Spanish company Elecnor and located in Cabo de la Vela, the northernmost tip of South America.
This wind farm, which has 10 wind turbines and had an investment of more than 75,000 million pesos (about 18.9 million dollars), is the first of a total of 16 that will be located in the department of La Guajira and is expected to to start operating commercially this first quarter of the year.
Duque stressed that Guajira 1 is in line with the country’s goals of becoming carbon neutral by 2050. “Many thought this was a quixotic battle,” said the president, who recalled that the first auction for the concession ” went wrong”.
However, according to Duque, “today we have achieved that Colombia has gone from those incipient 28 megawatts of installed renewable energy capacity that we had in August 2018 to having today 2,800 megawatts.”
Guajira 1, which occupies 5.5 hectares, will be followed by the Alpha and Beta complexes, in the hands of the Portuguese EDP, which will be much larger than the first, since it is expected to have 90 wind turbines that produce 504 megawatts of energy. .
“La Guajira for many years thought that the sun was not necessarily a blessing, that the sun by generating so much desert (…) ended up affecting the productive capacity; others thought that the wind became another factor of adversity,” stressed the president, who stressed that now that has changed.
Given the situation in La Guajira, the most desert region of the country that borders Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea, there are “wind speeds that represent twice the world average,” according to the Government, which will allow a constant production of energy and that can reach 20 megawatts, which is what almost 33,300 Colombian families consume.
