The top countries in the list are United States, China, Germany, India, Italy and Spain. The latter two are tied.

According to the survey, there are now ten ongoing wind energy projects in Brazil. Their combined capacity is 256.4 megawatts. Aside from those, over 45 projects have already been cleared by the National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel), with a potential to generate 2,139.7 megawatts.

Also in the field of wind energy, multinational corporation Siemens has announced that it is going to build a turbine manufacturing plant in Brazil.

The survey by Ernst & Young also mentions a program implemented by the Brazilian government in 2003, the Incentive Program for Alternative Sources of Electric Power (Proinfra), as being important to the development of alternative energy generation in the country, using sources such as wind, biomass, and small hydroelectric stations.

According to data from the survey, 85.4% of all energy in Brazil comes from renewable sources. One third of all renewable energy in the country comes from hydroelectric plants.

The survey also points to two Arab nations, among other countries, as markets that should emerge and become attractive to renewable energy investment. They are Morocco and Egypt, alongside countries such as South Korea, Taiwan and Chile, as well as Eastern Europe and Russia.

According to Ernst & Young, approximately ten years ago, wind energy generation used to total 13 gigawatts, a figure that has risen to 158 gigawatts. Solar energy, in turn, has gone from 1 gigawatt to 20 gigawatts.

The consultancy firm highlights the fact that despite the technical progress achieved in solar and wind energy, the cost of generating those energies is still high, and has not dropped as much as expected over the last ten years.

The survey, however, underscores that renewable energy generation is going to become crucial. In that respect, it cites large-scale projects that should be concluded, such as solar energy generation in North Africa for supplying the European market.

Anba

The plan anticipates that hydric energy will be reduced from 84% to 76% in the Brazilian energy matrix. To make up for it the participation of energy originating from thermoelectric sources will raise, during the period, from 16% to 24%.

The viability studies conducted by the EPE have mapped the location of the seven new plants. Five should be built in the Teles Pires river, in Mato Grosso state while the other are planned for the Apiacás river, also in Mato Grosso, and the Tocantins river, in the border between the states of Pará and Maranhão.

The Ten-Year Plan forecasts that Brazil will need to invest, during the period, 167.5 billion Brazilian reais (US$ 87.7 billion) in power generation and transmission, in order to live up to the economic growth.

Out of that total amount, power generation projects should absorb 133.6 billion reais (US$ 69.9 billion), and power transmission projects – including the construction of power lines and sub-stations – 33.9 billion reais (US$ 17.7 billion).

If projects aimed at the oil, natural gas, and biofuels segments are taken into account, the Plan estimates that total investment in the power sector should reach 573.2 billion reais (US$ 300 billion). The survey outlines two possible scenarios regarding the demand for electric power, considering the possibilities of annual economic growth rates at 4.2% and 4.9%.

The forecasts announced by the president at the EPE, Maurí­cio Tolmasquim, indicate that during the next ten years the Brazilian population should increase by 32 million people, reaching 212 million.

During the period, he explained, using more advanced conservation techniques, Brazil should save approximately 15,600 megawatts (MW) of power – the equivalent of the entire forecasted power generation at the Santo Antônio plant, one of the two hydroelectric units to be built on the Madeira River, in the northern Brazilian state of Rondônia.

With regard to power consumption until 2017, the forecasted growth is 5.5%. The country's installed power capacity should leap from the current 92,400 MW of power, to 143,080 MW. These forecasts consider an economic growth scenario of 4.9%.

ABr

I read somewhere that when told about a brutal and corrupt dictator in South America, former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) responded: “He is a son of a bitch but he is our son of a bitch.” Well that doesn’t work any more.

I saw Indians in the Amazon that had barely enough food to eat but had a TV set and received transmissions from Globo TV, the fourth largest TV network in the world. People might be poor and illiterate but they know what is going on in the world.

The Bush administration is deeply involved with the Middle East and the war in Iraq. Latin America is practically ignored by this government.

The international press continues saying that President Lula is a leftist. How funny. They confuse being from a working class family and being a former union leader with being leftist. People change, but the label remains. During his first term in office Lula appointed Henrique Meirelles, a former CEO of BankBoston, a strict monetarist and member of the opposition PSDB party as Central Bank president and later promoted him to Ministerial status.

Lula has followed a conservative economic policy. The highest interest rates in the world and a few palliative social programs. Brazil is the paradise for investors in the stock markets. Why invest in productive activities when you can earn a fortune overnight by investing in the financial markets. The result is more unemployment and a widening gap between the rich ad the poor.

Countless aristocrats and highfalutin intellectuals in Europe were members of the Communist party during the 20s and 30s, until they saw their socialist dreams crumble vis-à-vis the gulags, the terror, the genocide in the former Soviet Union.

The now deceased, world famous French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre was a member of the communist party, which he later left chastising the Soviet Union for having set up a brutal dictatorship.

Lula will continue to expand Brazil’s fuel ethanol program, biodiesel and H-Bio (diesel made from plants). And these alternative energies will make a splash in the international market, specially in Europe and Asia.

In March President George W. Bush is visiting Brazil and it is reported that one item on the agenda will be exporting fuel ethanol to the USA.

Now it is difficult to export Brazilian ethanol to the US. The American government subsidizes farmers despite the fact that ethanol in the US (made from corn) is more expensive to produce than Brazilian ethanol from sugar cane. In addition the US charges taxes on the importation of Brazilian ethanol.

Recent studies say that Brazil has the possibility of becoming the largest world power in alternative non-polluting energy just as Saudi Arabia is the largest exporter of petroleum.

During the next ten years  the plantation of sugar cane in Brazil is expected to yield 1.2 billion barrels of fuel ethanol per day. Petrobras has plans of becoming a fuel ethanol (or alcohol as said in Brazil) multinational. It already exports the product to Venezuela, Nigeria and Japan.

Petrobras brain CENPES in Rio de Janeiro, its world class R&D center is being physically increased a lot and pumped full of cash for further research and cooperation with their international peers.

Brazil is a very innovative country. Just give Brazilians the conditions and they create new technology, come out with new ideas etc. Cenpes will continue delighting the world with practical, economic technological innovations for ultra deep waters exploration and production.

Foreign organizations ignore Cenpes at your own expense! It’s no coincidence that Petrobras won the Offshore Technology Award (OTC) in Houston twice for excellence in deep water exploration and production. The OTC award is granted every year by dozens of international oil companies.

Oil in the Amazon: Brazil’s lightest oil is produced in the Amazon and there are millions of cubic meters of natural gas there. The problem of course is logistics. Difficult access, difficult transport of the products in and out of the region. But this is changing. Pipelines are being built, cities like Manaus, the capital of the Amazon state, are becoming major consumer centers.

Yes there is much corruption and disorganization in Brazil. But tell me a country where there isn’t? Corruption scandals with Enron, WorldCom and other companies led President Bush to pass an anti-corruption bill.

Hungarian leader said: “We lie in the morning, we lie in the afternoon and we lie at night.” The British government has been accused of exchanging cash donations to the ruling Labor party in exchange for a place in the House of Lords.

No country can hold the moral high ground.

I am amazed with the lack of basic knowledge of foreign cultures, economics and politics by many Western leaders. The Pope, hailed as a great theologian, making a speech that was interpreted by Muslims as offensive is sheer folly! And he is not alone in his ignorance. My hero, Albert Einstein once said, “there is only one disease that has no cure. Ignorance.”

Half jokingly, I told an American executive who had arrived recently in Brazil that “even Brazilian thieves had to work harder than thieves in the US.”  How so,” he asked astounded? Well, I responded, in America they rob dollars while here we have the Brazilian real which is not worth the paper it is printed on”..

Many Brazilians are very hard working. Most Brazilians are apolitical. They do not give a damn about politics. Public opinion polls show that most Brazilians feel that most politicians are corrupt and you have to fend for yourself. Voting is mandatory by law in Brazil.

An international study showed that Brazil ranked first among several countries polled where respondents said they preferred to own their own business than being employees. Unfortunately the bureaucracy to establish a small business  is so Kafkaesque, complex and taxes so high that most people become discouraged.

Brazilians certainly won’t engage in ethnic or religious violence. If you are a victim of violence it is because of someone’s greed, he wants your cash or property. The thug doesn’t care about your religion, color or nationality. Unlike the nazis who murdered Jews, physically or mentally disabled people and gypsies, Brazilian thugs are “democratic.” Anyone is fair game, as long as they have cash. No prejudice against anyone. Just cash.

No one in Brazil is going to blow himself up in the name of a “holy” war. Brazilians come from a Judeo Christian background and the fear of death is deeply instilled by belief in God just as in most Western societies.

Peter Howard Wertheim is a veteran international journalist specializing in covering South America’s petroleum and power sectors. He is based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and is fluent in English, Portuguese and Spanish. Comments welcome at  peterhw@frionline.com.br or peterhw@netflash.com.br.

In an address at the opening of the Brasil Ecodiesel biodiesel mill in the city of Crateús, in the northeastern Brazilian state of Ceará, he said: "Nobody has our conditions. There may even be countries that are larger than ours, but they have snow, hurricanes, typhoons and earthquakes. There are many things there. Not here. Here we lack a little rain, but we are going to work on the transposition of the São Francisco river."

According to Lula, reaching the objective of becoming an energy power is exclusively in the hands of Brazil. "The world is going to have to understand that Brazil is unbeatable in the production of renewable energy. And production does not depend on the world, it depends on us," he said.

The president pointed out, however, that despite biodiesel being "our great hope", Brazil still faces great resistance from the countries called first world.

"Because all that they make is good. What we make, cannot be. In Germany there is already a lorry using 100% biodiesel. In France there is too, but their industries here say that they only want to use 2%, 3%, 4%," he said.

Lula criticized the United States biodiesel production as they, according to him, spend a fortune in maize alcohol: "I believe that it is a waste to spend on maize to produce alcohol, when it may be made from sugarcane, in which Central America, Africa and Brazil are unbeatable."

He also discussed the need for the world to issue less polluting gas, once again criticizing the United States for not having signed the Kyoto Protocol. "A country like the United States, which is the main polluter on the planet, did not want to sign the Kyoto protocol and continues polluting," he said.

According to the president, "we are not yet considered a first world country due to our economic development, but due to our engagement with humanity, Brazil owes nothing to anybody."

ABr

"Brazil’s position is one of tranquility with respect to the energy situation, and there is currently sufficient spare electric capacity in the country to meet the growth in demand through 2009," he affirms. "Even with average economic growth on the order of 3.5% in the coming years."

The EPE is a government enterprise created by the Ministry of Mines and Energy in the area of electric energy planning.

Tolmasquim was interviewed by the Agência Brasil to respond to a comment made by the physicist Luiz Pinguelli Rosa, former president of Eletrobrás (the holding company in the electric sector).

According to Pinguelli, if no new investments are made in energy generation, the country runs the risk of having to impose rationing in 2008.

Tolmasquim, on the other hand, believes that the existing power plants, together with those that are under construction, are adequate to meet the demand for energy through 2009.

"We shall only need new power plants beginning in 2010, and this is already being taken care of through the auctions that will take place in December for the construction of new electric power plants," he affirms.

According to Tolmasquim, former executive secretary of the Ministry of Mines and Energy, the EPE operates on the assumption that annual energy demand will increase around 5.5%.

"Which is a reasonable hypothesis. Right now there is an energy surplus that will allow this demand to be met. Clearly, taking into account the plants that are under construction as well."

Agência Brasil