Cerro de Hula Wind Project
Santa Ana and San Buenaventura Municipalities, Honduras
March 2021 update - we have sold our last remaining carbon unit for this project and will be replacing it with a different high-impact project. The Cerro de Hula Wind installation would not have been possible without the support of the voluntary offsetters like you. It will continue to provide clean energy and local jobs for many years to come!
This project provides affordable electricity to the Honduran grid by means of a renewable, clean, and inexpensive source: the wind. The project makes use of 51, 2MW wind turbines, for a total of 102 MW produced - preventing 226,978 tonnes of CO2e from entering the atmosphere when compared to coal generation! Plus, it’s the first grid-connected wind energy project in Honduras and has helped electrify a rural region and catalyze social and economic development.
The project is located in Honduras, 24 km south of Tegucigalpa, Department Francisco Morazán, within the municipalities of Santa Ana and San Buenaventura, in the hills of Cerro de Hula and Izopo.
Awards and certifications
Carbon offsets help make this project possible by providing the necessary financing to make these energy installations cost-competitive with legacy fossil fuel technology in the region. This 'additionality' of carbon offsetting is critical for supporting the early deployment of renewable energy. As low carbon solutions are more widely deployed in developing countries such as India, supply chains will be built, the workforce will be upskilled, and these solutions will being to proliferate across the country. Importantly, additionality is a prerequisite for the environmental integrity of any carbon credit, protecting the buyer’s claim to have enabled climate mitigation and underpinning the integrity of offsetting and other financial claims.
According to International Energy Agency data, just 7.1% of the total energy supply in Honduruas came from solar and wind in 2018, despite the countries vast solar and wind resource, demonstrating the critical need to support the scaling of this technology immediately.
Why we chose this project
The electricity produced by this project is equivalent to 267,461,039 pounds of coal! That means it prevents over 220,000 tonnes of CO2e from entering our atmosphere. Furthermore, given Honduras’s poor electrical connectivity (over 30% of rural households lack electricity), this project presents an exciting opportunity to spur social and economic development. As the World Bank has stated, “Access to energy is at the heart of Development.” One succinct example: with electricity, more children can read at night - which means education can continue after the sun sets each day.
Additional highlights
The project developer, CMI Energia, promotes human development near project locations, including reforestation initiatives which compensate for any deforestation that occurs when developing its renewable energy projects. For every tree felled during construction, 10 trees will be planted in its place. These initiatives provide local employment and education opportunities for locals to learn about biodiversity conservation and ecosystem restoration. Additionally, the group supports infrastructure development initiatives of educational centers in the area of Tilarán.
Media
