Brazil a World Leader in Clean Energy

Brazil's abundant water, wind, and sun are providing remarkable opportunities for clean energy industries:

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, up to 77 percent of the world's energy needs could potentially be supplied from renewable sources by 2050, despite the current figure being a much more modest 13 percent.

Many heads of government around the world wondering how they can play their part in such a dramatic transformation could be forgiven for looking enviously at Brazil, where the figure already stood at 44.8 percent in 2010 and is forecast to rise to 46.3 percent in 2020.

While this increase may seem small in percentage terms, it fails to take into account the huge growth that will be seen in the country's raw energy demands — and the fact that the next decade could see the foundations laid for renewable energy to quickly become even more dominant in the years that follow. 

 The windy northeast region promises to become a center for the wind power industry:

...there are a variety of reasons to be optimistic. Given the substantial investment from both within Brazil and overseas, the nation's vast and almost entirely untapped wind potential is also beginning to attract attention to the fact that few other countries are as well-blessed in terms of solar power prospects.

Despite the installation of Belo Monte and various other hydroelectric plants, the proportion of Brazil's electricity supply coming from hydropower will be expected to actually fall from 75 percent of the total in 2010 to some 67 percent in 2020.

Meanwhile, other renewable sources, such as biomass, small-scale hydropower and, principally, wind will see the 9 GW they accounted for last year triple to 27 GW in 2020. This will take their contribution to the country's electricity supply from eight to 16 percent, keeping the overall contribution of renewables to electricity at 83 pecent.

By far the biggest jump in contributions will come from wind power, which currently supplies around one percent of Brazil's electricity but would supply seven percent by 2020 under the current plans.