You may recognize Costa Rica for its lush tropical rainforests and breathtaking beaches. However, Costa Rica has been making headlines in recent years for a...

The stations will allow the users of electric vehicles to charge 80 percent of the car battery within 20 minutes.

Costa Rica likes to advertise itself as an ecological paradise, where more than 98 percent of its electricity needs are met by clean energy. But in the automotive industry, it is lagging behind with just 600 out of 1.4 million private vehicles running on electricity rather than gas or diesel.

In 2018, just 1.44 percent of the country's electricity came from fossil fuel plants, the Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) said in a statement.

ICE president Carlos Manuel Obregón said the strategic location of the country's reservoirs allows it to maximize rainfall collection, mostly from the highlands and the Caribbean region.

Costa Rican homes and businesses that generate electricity through solar and other renewable sources can store surplus in the grid starting Friday.

With an electricity grid supplied by hydroelectric dams across rivers, from the heat of its numerous volcanoes, and from wind and the sun, the small Central American nation expects 97 percent of its energy generation to come from renewable sources this year.

Bright sunshine isn’t anything new to Costa Rica, but broad, consumer-based distributed generation solar power soon will be, following the recent publication of an executive decree on the issue.

Despite declarations from the executive branch that the Costa Rican government will not pursue geothermal electricity development in national parks, the office of governing Citizen Action Party legislator Ottón Solís is working on a bill to allow it in three volcanic protected areas.

The best historical precedent for the Environmental Protection Agency's action comes from Ronald Reagan. He's not exactly known as the environmental president, but he took the decisive steps toward solving an earlier air pollution problem: destruction of the ozone layer.