In February 2022, China and Ecuador issued a joint statement announcing the launch of free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations. After more than 10 months, the two countries concluded the bilateral FTA negotiations at the technical level. The Global Times (GT) reporter Liu Yang recently conducted an exclusive interview with Chen Guoyou (Chen), Chinese Ambassador to Ecuador, in which the ambassador shared his views on the China-Ecuador FTA and future cooperation, refuting foreign media outlet s smear against a local project under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
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Ecuador’s Power Grid Gets a Massive Makeover
Over the past two decades, Ecuador has added a lot of hydroelectric power to its mix. Going forward, natural gas generation is expected to play more of a role in maintaining reliability and adding flexibility. As more intermittent renewable resources are incorporated, reactive power assets will also be important.
Step into your DeLorean, set the controls for the year 2002, fire it up to 88 mph, and head to Ecuador. The electric grid of that time would be unrecognizable compared to that of today. Back then, a meager 7.9 GW of capacity could only provide power to a tiny portion of the population. An investment of nearly $5 billion over the decade that followed brought total capacity to more than 20 GW, and enabled an increase in househol