Brazilian Lessons In Football And Clean Energy
This article first published on RenewEconomy
Brazil’s football team, the Selecao, gave Australia’s Socceroos a lesson in the fine arts of football on Saturday (they won 6-0), and it seems that the country’s energy authorities could give Australia a lesson in how to bring in large scale renewables development as well.
As Australia faces at least another year of policy uncertainty and stagnation in the renewables sector, Brazil has attracted a huge amount of interest from the developers of wind farms and solar farms for a government auction in November.
The government energy agency EPE over the weekend announced it had received registrations for 929 wind farm proposals totaling 15,042MW of capacity and for 119 solar farms with 3,019MW of capacity. This includes 10 concentrated solar thermal projects, totaling 290MW.
Registrations have also been received for 295MW of small-hydro plants, 504MW of biomass projects, 39MW of biogas enterprises and 469MW of gas-fired power plants.
The auction system is similar to that employed by South Africa, another country whose national team gave Australia a sporting lesson on the weekend (the Springboks thumped the Wallabies 38-12 in a rugby union international). South Africa has targeted 3.2GW of renewable energy capacity by 2020, and is now completing construction of the first solar PV, solar thermal, and wind energy projects from its first round of auctions. The second auction is now underway.
Auctions have only been used in Australia by the ACT government, which has so far allocated 40MW of solar PV capacity to three projects that will be built within the next 18 months, although it may use the same mechanism to get another 660MW of renewable energy built by 2020.
The Brazilian auctions have been particularly successful. A recent round of bidding allocated 1,500MW of wind energy capacity at an average price of $49/MWh. Those projects must be complete by September, 2015.
EPE president Mauricio Tolmasquim says the inclusion of solar plants sized 5MW and above in the auction will herald the coming of age of solar in the country.
“With the verified fall of photovoltaic panel prices, solar energy generation will tend to gain space in the Brazilian energy matrix,” Tolmasquim said.
Not that there has been a shortage of interest in Australia. It’s just that it doesn’t result in much getting built. The now defunct Solar Flagships program, which was looking at constructing 1,000MW of large scale solar, attracted 50GW of proposals when it was first announced in 2009.
Still, the only project that will be built from that program, a 155MW facility spread between Broken Hill and Nyngan, will not begin construction until next year. By the time it is complete, late in 2015, all the winning tenders for Brazil’s November auction will be required to be on-line.
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Don´t trust official annoucements.
Yes Brazil has many projects for solar and wind farms but forgot to implement transmission lines to deliver to big cities in southeast.
Also Brazil has suffering of shortage of rain and Power plants are running thermal power plants.
“Don´t trust official annoucements.”
Ok, I can understand that. So you are basically writing that everything needs to be fact checked and put into the proper context…
With that in mind you wouldn’t happen to have any references to support your above assertions that the solar and wind installed in Brazil have no power lines. Or if nobody in official channels will say that perhaps something like actual power usage. So that we could deduce what you are saying is right?
Your argument doesn’t hold up. A kWh of electricity coming from solar panels is a kWh that doesn’t have to be produced using coal. Already Australia is retiring 9 GW of coal generation because solar has made them unnecessary.
Right now I’m using my computer, my refrigerator is running, and the radio is playing. Later on today I’ll be using my circular saw and air compressor – all run from solar and my inverter. Over 20 years and my inverter has not gone up in smoke.
Very nice article because it piggybacks on sports which virtually everybody watches and national pride. Both get the blood flowing like nothing else. I’d like to see a lot more articles using these techniques. It might catch on and influence legions. I know my kids idolize people who seem to have only muscle skills. The concept of well trained muscle memory being worthy of constant adulation during the waking hours mystifies me but I do notice nothing else is as effective for advertising. So lets see more articles like this!
I live part of the year in Brazil, and have seen no rooftop solar yet apart from from the loss-leading soccer stadium roofs, basically clever advertising. There´s a net metering law, but I suspect the incumbent utilities are dragging their feet about grid connections. At the moment Chile and Mexico are ahead on solar. Fossil generation is a dead duck; in the latest auction for which they were eligible, they won no allocations. The battle now is between wind and solar – which can be installed close to the centres of population near the Atlantic- and increasingly remote and environmentally destructive big hydro plants in the Amazon.