Itaipu is mostly considered a brazillian infrastructure. Brazil paid for most of the construction, which is why they negotiated very good deals on the agreement with paraguay, which is the size of a brazillian municipality. They pay like $20 per Kw instead of the $400 the market would pay.

the deal is up now btw, so the media is covering paraguay attempt to renegotiate it.

> Paraguay, which is the size of a brazillian municipality.

That's understating that country's size a lot; it's the size of a Brazilian state, not a Brazilian municipality (even if you consider the huge municipalities in the Amazon region).

He's talking about population, not physical size.

There exists this page:

https://www.itaipu.gov.br/energia/geracao

But they don't seem to publish anything on the Brazilian data portal (that's bad), nor they seem to publish anything parseable on their site.

I also couldn't find any breakdown of the energy sold to each country. The Brazilian electric system operator (ONS) has the Brazilian numbers, but I don't know where to get the other ones.

> Tangentially, Paraguay runs entirely on hydropower from the Itaipu dam

Which is hardly incidental, having access to ungodly amounts of hydro power is the easiest way to run on 100% renewables. Iceland has similarly been 100% (or near enough) renewables for decades, despite more than 70% of its electricity going to aluminum smelters.

Norway similarly runs on 100% renewable electricity because it has enough hydro for pretty much all of it (Norway is the 213th country by population, but something like top 10 hydro producer)

I’d always lazily imagined Iceland’s renewable production to involve mainly their geothermal resources. I was surprised to learn that a phenomenal amount of hydro came online in a pretty quick period in the ‘00s [0].

A casual shufti suggests this was part of a broad policy push, but that it was mainly to do with a series of purpose-built hydro projects specifically to support Alcoa’s smelting facility. [1]

It smells like there’s a story of a few strong personalities with ambitious visions somewhere in the mix here. Would any of this crowd know where I might turn to find that story?

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kárahnjúkar_Hydropower_Plant... (with a fair bit of Wikipedian NIMBY-ish color commentary in the mix there)

The overall energy mix leans much more heavily on geothermal, but it’s used a lot for direct heating.

And Kárahnjúkar is not a case of the NIMBY, to an approximation there’s no one living in the highlands. It’s large scale environmental destruction for the benefits of a large company which the people of Iceland objected to.

Tasmania has long produced more than enough power from hydro.

A Paraguayan here. The above claim is not entirely true.

Paraguay has access to Itaipú hydropower, and it certainly powers most of the energy grid, but not all.

There's also the Yacyretá dam, which is jointly held with Argentina, downstream from the Itaipú site on the same Paraná river. It generates quite significant amounts of electricity and Paraguay also uses some of it to power its grid.

And there's also the Acaray dam, which is wholly owned by Paraguay, in operation since 1973.

There's also a dam on the Yguazú river (not the same river than the one with the falls) which is not machinized but otherwise ready to enter production once it's equipped with turbines.

Some isolated locations on the Chaco (northern area) also run on solar power and some also on timber/wood-based plants, but these are rapidly being obsoleted by power lines coming from Itaipú.

With that provision aside, it could be said that Paraguay has been getting its electrity from wholly renewable sources since at least 1983.

Thank you for correcting me! Most of my information is from the Wikipedia page I referenced, so this is helpful context to be able to reference in the future.