Alto Maipo SpA wants to turn snow from high in the Andes Mountains into electricity for Chileans, but climate change is getting in the way, Bloomberg News reported. The AES Corp. subsidiary, which has been developing power plants that will use Andean snowmelt to produce electricity, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware yesterday. Declining power prices and increasingly scarce snow have made the project unsustainable in its current form, Alto Maipo said in court papers. “Unfortunately, in recent years, climate change has had a devastating impact on precipitation in the Andes Mountains, with the result that the rivers that will supply the project have experienced a steep decline in overall water flow,” Javier Dib, Alto Maipo’s board president, said in court papers. “The combination of lower prices and less precipitation mean that when the project goes online, it will be operating in a dramatically different economic and environmental reality than Alto Maipo originally forecasted.” Using the water flow levels of the last 59 years, the Alto Maipo project would’ve generated an average of 2,218 gigawatt-hours of energy per year, according to a report commissioned by the company. It would yield less than half of that in 2021 -- an estimated 1,100 GWh.
