Brazil is an emerging leader in renewable energy with enormous potential in solar, wind and biomass. However, growth in renewable energy in Brazil is likely to be severely affected by recent economic shocks. When it has grown, it has failed to impact the lives of the poorest in society.
The Brazil Energy Programme (BEP) was aimed at accelerating Brazil’s uptake of non-hydro renewable energy amidst an administration that was resistant to climate change narratives and a congress actively promoting the expansion a domestic gas market. Despite Covid-19 and the consequent budget cuts, ASI’s BEP team worked with a wide range of actors from Ministers to women-led households to generate momentum across biogas, biofuels, hydrogen, solar, storage, offshore wind and renewable energy research and development.
Progress included:
• Catalysing the regulation of biomethane across all 27 states with data, guidelines and partnerships that will help state governments unlock over 7GWs of energy per year from the agriculture, solid waste management and water treatment with job creation for low-income communities.
• Developing a chain of custody solution adopted by the federal fuels regulator (ANP) to accelerate the emergence of a meaningful carbon credit market in Brazil that will ensure biofuels support biodiversity and income growth within poor regions.
• Building consensus within government on the future direction of blue and turquoise hydrogen so that policymakers and investors can begin to build the infrastructure needed to develop a significant hydrogen industry that will empower women and support livelihoods for Afro-Brazilians.
• Generating alternatives for the national social tariff scheme that can redirect subsidies away from energy consumption and into solar energy generation owned and operated by low-income households.
• Building the evidence base, the market analysis and the regulatory framework for Offshore Wind (OSW) so that the first auctions for OSW generated energy can be held in 2022, rather than 2024 as originally planned at the start of the programme.
• Building a central online database for all clean energy research, development and innovation (RD&I) public and publicly-oriented investments so that policymakers, companies, research institutes and investors have the analysis they need to make the most strategic investments into RD&I.
In each case BEP started by identifying the gaps in the current evidence base, bringing UK experience to develop innovative solutions and empowering the right stakeholders to use the data and solutions to advance regulatory and market reforms.
