These countries run on almost fully renewable electricity, for a reason beyond climate policy

Seven countries generate more than 99.7 percent of their electricity from renewable sources: Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That sounds like a ranking of the most ambitious climate policy. It is not.

With one exception, the same thing stands behind every one of these figures: hydropower. And hydropower depends on two things no government can legislate. Rainfall and difference in altitude.

Why mountains and rain decide the ranking

A hydroelectric plant needs water that falls. The greater the drop and the more reliable the volume, the cheaper the electricity. Countries with high mountains and heavy rainfall therefore have an energy source that can be planned, can be stored and stays extremely cheap for decades. Geography only supplies the precondition. These plants were built by people, and where a reservoir is created, villages and fields usually have to go.

Paraguay is the clearest example. The country covers its electricity demand almost entirely with hydropower, above all from Itaipú, one of the largest hydroelectric plants in the world, which it operates jointly with Brazil. The surplus is so large that Paraguay exports electricity.

For the other countries the list reads like a relief map. Nepal and Bhutan lie in the Himalayas. Albania is mountainous and wet. Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have large river systems with a considerable gradient.

The ranking does not measure who wants it most. It measures who has mountains and rain.

— TerraTally · Climate desk

Iceland is the special case, the only one of these countries that does not rest on hydropower alone. There geothermal energy comes in as well. The island sits on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the boundary between two plates drifting apart. Hot water and steam are available at shallow depth, not only for electricity but also for the district heating of its towns. That too is geography: Iceland can use geothermal energy because it lies on a plate boundary, the same kind of seam that is currently tearing a continent open in East Africa.

For Germany, Japan or the Netherlands this route is closed. Flat land offers hardly any drop, and a drop cannot be built. Those countries have to go via wind and photovoltaics, sources that fluctuate and therefore need storage, grids and reserve capacity. That is technically harder than a reservoir, which stores by its nature.

Then there is size. Among the seven leaders, electricity consumption per head and in total is comparatively low, which is why a single large plant can cover a substantial part of demand. In an industrial nation with a high base load that arithmetic does not work.

A note on the statistics as well: almost all of these figures refer to electricity, not to total energy use. Heating, industry and transport in these countries often still run on fossil fuels. Anyone reading numbers about renewable energy should therefore look closely at what was measured. Electricity is usually the smaller part.

The ranking is still instructive. It does not show who is most ambitious. It shows how much the energy transition depends on where a country lies, and how much more work it takes where the landscape does not help.