PSR, in consortium with the company MRC, won an international tender to carry out detailed decarbonization studies for eighteen countries in Latin America and the Caribbean: Argentina, Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ecuador, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Trinidad & Tobago, Uruguay and Venezuela. The study covers an area of 19 million square kilometers and a population of 630 million people, comparable to the sum of the United States and the European Union.

The objective is to develop a “net zero” expansion plan to 2050 for each country, taking into account their respective renewable resources and possibilities of energy exchange with neighboring countries; the additional electrification of sectors of the economy such as industry, urban mobility and the export of “green” products such as hydrogen and steel; effect of climate change, especially on water resources and temperature; insertion of distributed generation, typically residential solar panels; and actions for the energy inclusion of low-income segments and for gender equality.

The net zero plans will be developed with PSR computational models for the optimal integrated expansion of generation and transmission systems (OptGen); optimal stochastic operation (SDDP); and generation of probabilistic scenarios of renewable production and river inflows (TSL Climate). These models are already used in most countries, including Brazil and Mexico, and represent the hourly evolution and production variability of wind and solar generation; uncertainty in inflows, including the impact of climate change; the need for operating reserves and flexibility to manage this variability and uncertainty; the use of storage resources such as reservoirs, pumped hydro and batteries; distributed generation and demand response, among other features.

PSR has extensive experience in integrated studies on the insertion of renewables, impact of climate change and decarbonization for countries and regions, carried out for governments and for international organizations such as CAF (Development Bank of Latin America, contractor of this study), IDB (Inter-American Development Bank), World Bank (for whom PSR recently conducted a detailed net zero study for Brazil); IRENA (International Renewable Energy Agency); Olade (Latin American Organization for Energy Development); and CIER (Committee for Regional Electricity Integration).