With Brazil’s
historic drought drying up its hydroelectric plants, the South American
country is turning to solar power to help relieve its foreboding
energy crisis.
Brazil’s
devastating drought has depleted its reservoirs causing the nation to consider
alternative energy options besides hydropower, which supplies more than 75
percent country’s power.
The nation announced that
within four months, it will commence pilot tests of a gigantic floating solar farm
located atop the Balbina hydroelectric plant in the Amazon. It’s currently
unclear how physically large the floating farm will be, but the enormous
reservoir it will sit oncovers 2,360 square kilometers.
At 350
megawatts, Brazil’s ambitious project would easily trump Japan’s currently
largest 13.4 megawatt floating solar power plant in terms of power output.
To put that in another perspective, the largest solar farm in the world is
the 550 megawatt Desert Sunlight Solar Farm in California.
Diversifying
energy sources is clearly a necessity for the notoriously parched country.
Brazil is experiencing its worst drought in four decades, causing electricity
blackouts in many regions. Below-average rainfall in the last few years have
depleted its reservoirs, thus gutting its formerly plentiful supply of
hydropower, which supplies more than three-quarters of the country’s
electricity, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
As Climate
News Network reported, “the reservoirs in the drought-affected region
could fall to as little as 10 percent of their capacity, which … Mines and
Energy Minister Eduardo Braga admits would be ‘catastrophic’ for energy
security.”
While the
sunny country has tremendous potential for solar power, Brazil has been slow to
embrace this form of renewable energy. It was only in October 2014,
when Brazil made its first foray into this sector with the construction of 31
solar parks, its first large-scale solar project with a combined capacity of
1,048 megawatts.
A shift to
solar energy might be fitting, as the Balbina Dam (where the proposed solar
farm will eventually sit) has been criticized for emitting more
greenhouse gases than a coal-fired power plant.
“We are
adding technological innovation, more transmission lines, diversifying our
energy generation source, introducing solar energy in a more vigorous manner
and combining solar energy with hydroelectric energy,” Braga told
reporters about the solar farm project.
“We are
preparing ourselves to win the challenge in 2015 and be able to deliver a model
and an electric system starting in 2016 which will be cheaper, more secure and
with greater technological innovation,” Braga said. Electricity produced at the
farm is expected to cost between $69 and $77 per megawatt hour, reports
say.