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Energy crisis hits power-hungry Brazil

Country is a hostage to its hydroelectric dams Associated Press

October 14, 2001

FOZ DO IGUACU, Brazil - At the entrance of the world's biggest power station, not far from the thundering Iguacu Falls, a sign boasts: "One billion megawatts! Enough energy to illuminate the planet for a full month."

Declared one of the seven engineering wonders of the world by the American Engineering Society after it opened in the mid-1980s, the Itaipu hydroelectric station produces a quarter of the energy driving Latin America's biggest economy. So far it has generated a billion megawatts.

Impressive though Itaipu might be, it also is a symbol of a country hostage to its own hydroelectric power and currently hit by its worst energy crisis in decades.

When the first of Itaipu's 18 turbines started turning, Brazilians hailed the event as a big step toward energy self-sufficiency.

Its 12.6 megawatts/hour capacity, the government boasted, was just a fraction of the hydroelectric potential of a country whose lakes and rivers hold 12 percent of Earth's drinking water.

But the energy crisis that has brought emergency rationing across the country since June is a shocking reminder of how far Brazil is from that goal.

Water is flowing down to the Itaipu's dam, but as Brazilians struggle to slash 20 percent off their electricity use, many feel they are back in the time when microwave ovens, personal computers and other modern energy-eating appliances did not exist yet for mass consumption.

The shock waves have reached even this city on the Brazilian-Paraguayan border.

"One gets used to it," said Oracilda de Oliveira, receptionist at the Foz do Iguacu hotel, whose lobby lights are dimmed. "You turn lights off as soon as you don't need them anymore. It becomes automatic, at home or in the office."

The Itaipu station belongs to both Paraguay and Brazil, but Paraguay uses only a tenth of its 50 percent share. The rest it sells to Brazil. But that's still not enough to meet Brazil's needs.

So, 10 years after Itaipu was finished using investments of $16 billion, the noise of trucks unloading construction materials is back. A consortium led by France's Alston is installing two additional turbines to raise its output by 1,400 megawatts per hour to 14,000 megawatts per hour by 2004. The price: $185 million.

"These additions represent the power of a medium-size hydroelectric plant which, if built independently, would cost at least $1 billion," says Claudio Benetta, an Itaipu spokesman.

But to avoid California-like blackouts, the country would have to compensate for the lack of investment in energy through most of the 1990s, when the economy grew faster than the supply of energy.

Investments in the electrical sector in that period were just $6 billion - half of the previous decade's, according to official figures.

Copyright © 2001, The Baltimore Sun

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-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), October 14, 2001