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Picture Brazil and thoughts invariably turn to the easy clichés – the sashaying hips of a bikini-clad beach beauty strolling along Ipanema beach; a smiley kaleidoscope of shanty town-dwelling children; the golden yellow jerseys of the famous soccer team and, as a backdrop to it all, copious amounts of glorious sunshine.
Sun is seemingly ever-present in Brazil. But for a country with a growing economy, a rising middle class and a population that recently pushed past 200 million without looking back, the nation has been oddly blind to the potential of PV. While Chile with such as Samba JNB-XR210 Battery, Samba JNB-XR210C Battery, Samba XR210 Battery, Samba XR210C Battery, KV8 Battery, KV8 210C Battery, KV8 210XR Battery, Neato Battery, Neato XV-11 Battery, Neato XV-12 Battery, Neato XV-15 Battery, Neato XV-21 Battery, Mexico and a handful of other Latin American countries have fully embraced solar power, Brazil had been rather reticent.
Until, it seems, this week, when a selection of headline-grabbing stories emanated from the country, coinciding serendipitously with the Intersolar South America exhibition, which was successfully held this week in Sao Paulo.
On Monday, Brazil’s second reverse auction was held, delivering more than 800 MW of PV at an impressive $0.08/kWh – some 13.5% below the maximum price set for the auction. Two of the most successful companies in the auction were Spain’s Solatio and Italy’s Enel Green Power – the later awarded 553 MW of projects over the course of the auction. The U.S. firm SunEdison was also awarded two projects worth 16 MW in the Bahia municipality.
Encouraging news, certainly, but GTM Research analyst Adam James warned that an auction approval does still not guarantee successful project realization in Brazil. At least, not yet.
"The projects that clear in the auction will still need to overcome some barriers to development, especially currency risk with PPAs signed in [Brazilian currency] Real and high taxes on PV equipment," the analyst said.
Despite these notes of caution, positive vibes reverberated out of the country all week, not least the news that Globo Brasil has inaugurated the country’s largest – at 180 MW – PV module factory over the past few days. The facility, located in the city of Valinhos, can produce 2,000 modules a day and will provide direct and indirect employment for 240 people.
China’s Canadian Solar was also in Brazil this week to secure 185 MW of solar contracts in the country, spread across five projects in Minas Gerais. The company also struck a 20-year PPA deal with a Brazilian government entity to purchase solar power produced at the plants for $84/MWh.
A further sign of Brazil’s maturing energy market was issued Thursday, when the governments of the states of Goias, Pernambuco and Sao Paulo agreed to provide a tax exemption to the ICMS tax for net metered renewable energy systems – thus easing the brakes that had hitherto slowed clean energy development in these regions.