He helped Uruguay decarbonize. Can he help other countries do the same?
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- Ramón Méndez Galain won a $4 million Climate Breakthrough award in September 2025 to scale his nonprofit Asociación Ivy beyond its one-country-at-a-time model, with a stated goal of reaching at least 50 countries by 2035 and avoiding roughly two gigatons of emissions.
- Uruguay reached 98–99% clean electricity under Galain's seven-year tenure as energy secretary while retaining public ownership of its utility and grid — a combination the IMF and World Bank predicted couldn't work, according to the source.
- Galain transitioned from particle physics at Universidad de la República in Montevideo to energy secretary after President Tabaré Vázquez offered him the job; he had proposed renewables over a planned nuclear plant during a crisis of drought, $150/barrel imported oil, and rolling blackouts.
- Uruguay's grid design treats hydropower as a "battery" buffering wind and solar baseload, with thermal plants kept online as insurance for the last 2% — a configuration Galain credits to public utility control enabling long-term planning.
- Galain argues climate was not the lead argument that sold the energy transformation domestically; the cross-party political deal was instead framed around energy security and cost after the 2008 crisis, per the source.
- The replication gap: seven years after Uruguay's transformation, no other country has fully followed its path, though Ivy is now working with governments including Colombia and Haiti on electricity system redesign.
Why it matters: The $4M award gives Ivy the resources to operate beyond project-by-project advisory work, but the source highlights that no nation has replicated Uruguay's public-utility-plus-private-capital model in seven years — suggesting the binding constraint is political and institutional design, not technology. For global south governments weighing public versus private control of clean energy buildouts, the Ivy playbook is now the most concrete export attempt in the field.
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