Sustainable Energy in Ecuador and Latin America: A Review of the Energy Landscape of the Type of Renewable Sources

The development of a region is closely related to the consumption of electrical energy as long as the generation is able to meet the needs of industry, commerce and residence. This paper reviews the production, consumption of traditional energy and especially renewable generation in Latin America, detailing the energy trend in recent years in Ecuador. On the other hand, it shows the general overview of the development of renewable energies, such as hydroelectric, biomass, wind, solar, and biogas in the South American country. The figures show that the renewable energy installed in the country went from 20,382.76 GWh in 2010 to 37,036.70 in 2024, while generation from renewable sources went from 43.54% to 73.19% in the same period of time. Non-conventional renewable energies have not had an expected growth as is the case of solar despite the abundant solar resource that on average global insolation is 4,575 Wh/m²/day, in 2010 the installed solar and wind power went from 0.02 MW and 2.4 MW to 29.06 MW and 71.13 MW respectively. Another of the main findings is the decrease in post-pandemic energy consumption in Latin America, in 2017 consumption was 2477,207 GWh of which 55.7% comes from renewable sources while in 2021 consumption was 1637,868 GWh corresponding to 58.97 from renewable sources. The document opens other lines of research as proposals for the legislation that regulates renewable energies in Ecuador, from distributed generation for the self-supply of regulated consumers to the methodology for the term and prices of generation and self-generation projects.