Bills integrating the final report of the committee will be forwarded to government before March 15th.

On Wednesday (18), the president of the Special Committee on Renewable Energy Sources, Deputy Rodrigo Rocha Loures (PMDB-PR), affirmed that the committee should present the suggestion of the Decennial Plan on the Energy Expansion 2008-2017, currently in a public consultation. Rocha Loures proposed that the committee anticipate points at the final report in the suggestion which will be forwarded to the government.

“That will probably be done, and will have to be done before March 15th, since there has been an expansion, an increase in the term, and we will benefit from that increase. I will consult the members of the committee and will try to anticipate some points in their bills”, said the congressman.

The special committee held a debate on Wednesday on the use of renewable sources of energy in Brazil. According to Rocha Loures, there are 16 bills being processed jointly with the Bill 630/03, according to the former Deputy Roberto Gouveia, who forecasts incentives on the usage of this kind of energy. Those bills, according to his evaluation, can be part of what the decennial plan seeks to answer. “The Brazilian matrix will continue to be as clean as currently? And, if yes, at what cost will we offer energy in Brazil for it to grow and develop and keep being an environmental power?” he challenged.

Shy expression
The Decennial Energy Plan 2008/2017 has been criticized exactly because it forecasts a shy expansion of renewable energies in the next years. The wind source, for instance, would go from a participation of 0.3%, at the energetic matrix, in 2008, to 0.9%, in 2017, while thermal and fuel oil, which are more polluting, would go from 0.9%, in 2008, to 5.7%, in 2017.

MarioVeiga Pereira, a consultant in the energy area, considered the absence of biomass as another delicate point in the plan presented by the government. “What worried the people was that the decennial plan does not open any space for biomass, whose cost is cheap, and wind, which is competitive, and bets all on the construction of hydroelectrical power plants, which is wonderful, except for the fact that the environmental license is a problem”, he evaluated.

Competitiveness
At the request of the Brazilian Association on Wind Energy (Abeeólica), Mario Veiga elaborated a study showing the competitiveness of wind energy. At the public hearing on Wednesday, Veiga showed that, in the opposite of what the government had forecast, the wind matrix will not bring extra costs to the consumer, provided that it is adopted as complementary to the hydroelectrical power plants and that the cost of energy in Brazil considers the negative environmental effects of the polluting sources, such as the thermal ones.

In a projection of insertion of an average 4000 MW of wind energy at the Brazilian matrix, in the next ten years, in substitution to possible thermal, the cost of electricity generated by the winds would be only R$17 MWh (approximately 7 dollars by MWH), more than the average of other sources, without taking into consideration the environmental benefits, according to Mario Veiga.

The answer by the government to the figures should be given on the first week of March, according to the president of the committee. The collegiate will invite the president of the Energetic Research, Mauricio Tolmasquim.

Report - Ana Raquel Macedo/SR
Translation – Positive Idiomas Ltda