Policies to Encourage the Sustainable Development of Brazilian Electricity System with Distributed Generation
Daniel Vieira
Policies to Encourage the Sustainable Development of Brazilian Electricity System with Distributed Generation
Brazil is a developing economy that is growing fast and expects a massive increase in electricity demand in the next decades. That will require, in addition to the traditional central generation schemes, efficient usage of the distributed resources to generate electricity close to the load centres. This would entail government intervention with adequate policies to suitably encourage the best options of distributed generation.
In order to do that, five distributed generation technology options were chosen in the present work (small hydro, biomass, photovoltaic solar systems, wind energy and cogeneration) with the aim of establishing which of these alternatives would be the most appropriate to be encouraged by policymakers in Brazil in a holistic approach that takes into account economic, environmental, social and technical aspects of each option.
The conclusions point out several positive impacts of possible policies to encourage small hydro, biomass and wind energy technologies and shows that the contribution of photovoltaic systems to the sustainable development of Brazil is very limited. The work also includes further discussion of the results and the trade-offs involved in the decision making process, as well as a sensitivity analysis to assess the vulnerabilities of the assumptions used and the robustness of the results presented.