Today we visited a coffee farm in Monteverde and learned about Costa Rica’s renewable energy system. The coffee farm felt a lot more genuine than Cafe Britt. There were no sample stations everywhere, the gift shop was small and had prices in colones instead of dollars, and the tour actually took us through the real farm rather than just around a staged area. We also got to shovel, rake, and plant bean and corn seeds ourselves, which was one of the more fun and hands on experiences of the whole trip.

On the renewable energy side, Costa Rica generates around 13,000 kilowatts of electricity through a mix of hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, and solar power, with about 60% coming from hydroelectricity alone. The biggest pro is that the diversity of sources works as a backup system. If one of them stops working, the others fill the gap, which is exactly what happened in 2024 when a drought hurt the hydroelectric supply, and all the wind turbines had to run at full capacity to compensate. Seeing the turbines in person was pretty cool, and learning that they actually shut some of them off when the country is producing more energy than it needs was something I had never considered before.

The cons are real, though. Droughts are a growing threat, and when none of the renewable sources are enough, Costa Rica still falls back on fossil fuels for about 5% of its electricity, which shows the system is not completely airtight. There is also the issue of rising demand, with AI data centers consuming so much power that even countries like the US are looking at rebooting nuclear plants just to keep up. Costa Rica is ahead of most countries on renewable energy, but the drought problem alone shows that even a well built system has weak points that are only going to get harder to manage over time.