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Friday, November 21, 2014

Why isn't Brazil exploiting its amazing wind capacity?

Renewables star Brazil is now backtracking towards fossil fuels. Why, when wind could provide vital jobs? 
solar in brazil

Brazil has made huge strides in divesting from fossil fuels. In 2009 the countryproduced a staggering 85% of its electricity from renewable resources. Nearby Argentina hit just 29.2%, while renewably generated electricity is a scant 19.5%of the world’s supply. 
Those impressive figures have been harvested mainly through heavy investment in hydro power, with 75% of its total renewable energy coming from this resource. Meanwhile its potential for wind power has been left largely untouched. At present Brazil invests just $5.42bn (£3.4bn) in wind power despite having atotal estimated potential of 300 gigawatts (GW). However, spending on hydropower projects, which have a smaller total energy potential of 260GW, has topped $150bn.
It seems that Brazil has no plans to change the direction of its renewables investments. Headed by the Ministry of Mines and Energy and state-run energy research company Empresa de Pesquisa Energética (EPE), Brazil’s 10-year plan for energy expansion states that installed capacity from hydro will increase from 84.8GW to 119GW by 2022, yet installed capacity for other renewables (small hydroelectric, biomass and wind) will rise from 15.3GW to 38.1GW in the same time period.
Meanwhile there is a new emphasis on fossil fuel, with plans to increase oil production to 5m barrels per day by 2023. Roberto Kishinami, the former executive director of Greenpeace Brazil and international board member for ActionAid, says that Brazil’s energy plans represent a backtrack on previous commitments to a clean energy future.
He said: “This is a kind of schizophrenic plan. Solar, wind and biomass are the alternative for the future. The choices the Brazilian government is taking in the energy sector are going backwards and will squander the investments. This will make us attached to an old model based on fossil fuels that has no future and shall end in three decades.”

The second most competitive renewable resource in Brazil, wind is a much cheaper source of energy than solar or biomass and generation costshave been falling for a number of years. According to the World Energy Council and Bloomberg New Energy Finance,Brazil has the world’s third lowest costs for wind power generation, behind India and China.
“The estimation of wind potential can even be much higher because right now we are only calculating infrastructure onshore with a certain meters high of a wind turbine and a speed average of seven meters/second,” said Kishinami.
Wind plants are currently about 30 to 60 meters high, he says, but new plants under construction will be 100 metres tall, meaning that they can take advantage of faster and less turbulent wind, generating more energy.
“We are far behind from what we can do,” said Kishinami. “We could have a national plan for installing new capacity for 1GW of wind every year.”
For Elbia Melo, the executive president of the Brazilian Wind Energy Association, the map of wind potential in Brazil is concentrated on poor areas with low social indexes like the states of Bahia, Rio Grande do Norte, Pernambuco, Piauí and Ceará.
“It is in those regions where we have the best wind. That is to say, the poorest areas in the country are the ones that have our most abundant winds. So we also have a possibility to increase life quality, regional income and human development index,” said Melo.
But crucially, in her opinion, producing wind energy will not mean that smallholder farmers are forced to give up agriculture or cattle-raising activities. “Those farmers will also benefit from an increase in their annual income for the next 20 years – the lifecycle of those wind turbines and towers. We will change completely the lives of those families whose survival depends on the support of social programs,” she said.
By the end of 2014, it is expected that 140 wind farms will be operating across Brazil, providing energy to 12m homes, and creating 120,000 jobs by 2018. “Brazil has a great chance to become one of the most renewable countries, using its natural resources and being competitive at the same time,” said Melo. “We already produce the cheapest wind power in the world. What we need now is to better manage our advantages.”

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