Which country has the highest share of renewable electricity in the Americas?

Uruguay, which now generates the overwhelming majority of its electricity from renewables and has run for long stretches on close to 100 per cent - and it did it in about a decade, from a position of importing fossil fuels and suffering blackouts.

How it was done is unusually well documented and unusually boring, which is the point. There was no technological breakthrough: the state set a long-term plan with cross-party agreement so it would survive changes of government, offered fixed twenty-year contracts to private wind developers so financing was cheap, and used the existing hydro dams as a battery - holding water back when the wind blows and releasing it when it does not. No subsidies of the kind that usually attract criticism, and electricity prices fell.

The country is a small one with good wind and existing hydro, so it is not a template anyone can copy directly. What travels is the financing structure and the political durability - the argument frequently made about it is that the hard part of an energy transition is rarely the engineering. Uruguay also exports surplus power to Argentina and Brazil, which is a reversal of a century of importing energy from both.