Hydro brings independence to remote farmers

In the deep south of Brazil, small-scale hydro plants are bringing robust, reliable supplies of power to farming communities.In the deep south of Brazil, in the rolling countryside of the Rio Grande do Sul, there’s a revolution under way.

This isn’t about political turmoil – but it is transforming lives. It’s a very physical revolution. The kind that happens when a rush of water hits the blades of a turbine and spins it around, generating electricity.

Brazil’s big dams are a mixed blessing, but the hydro power here is on a much more human – and sustainable – scale. Two ‘mini-hydro’ plants, installed by the Cooperativa Regional de Eletrificacao Rural do Alto Uruguai Ltda (CRERAL), a co-operative owned and run by local people, are bringing robust, reliable supplies of power to thousands of farming families across the remote Alto Uruguai region.

Local co-ops such as CRERAL were set up in the 1960s and 70s in an effort to speed the electrification of remote areas. They are responsible for buying in power and selling it onto their members.

But by the mid-90s, their members were increasingly frustrated by persistent power shortages and blackouts. It made it difficult to modernise their homes and farms, and their children were starting to turn their backs on rural life to seek better opportunities elsewhere. They voted in a new leadership, under President João Alderi do Prado, with new ideas – notably that of generating their own power. It seems to have worked. Now that the two mini-hydro plants, with a combined capacity of 1.9MW, have come onstream, things are changing. More power means there’s enough juice to run everything from irons, showers, fridges and freezers, to agricultural equipment like milking machines. This has not only improved people’s quality of life, but also their income. As farmer Vilson Antonio Ascoli told me: “It was a huge difference when the hydro came. Before we were just clinging on, really. Now we’ve got the milk cooler, and the freezer for the meat, so we can store more and sell more as a result. Our income’s gone up by at least 50%. So we’ve bought more cows – we have 10 now”. His wife, Terezhina, added: “We can have different things going at the same time. I can have a shower while he’s watching the TV”.

A neighbouring farmer, Alcir Bertiol, agreed. “It’s much better now I can rely on the fridge. It means I can store the milk till the tanker comes. I had the fridge before, but you never knew for certain if there’d be power or not. If the power was out, you’d still have to milk the cows, but your work would go literally down the drain.”

At present, the two plants meet around a quarter of CRERAL members’ total electricity needs. (The rest is bought in from conventional sources.) The co-op is now investing in a further four mini-hydro schemes, which should enable it to cover most, if not all, of the demand – giving it effective energy independence. It is doing so on a purely commercial (not subsidised) basis. And it has started to attract carbon funding, as well.

There’s no reason why others can’t follow CRERAL’s example, says Alderi, as surveys show this region alone has “hundreds” of sites suitable for mini-hydro.

CRERAL’s prospects were boosted by a flood of publicity in Brazil and elsewhere when it won an Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy in 2008. As electricity prices increase, so the economic logic of its approach – and of decentralised energy in general – seems set to become ever more apparent. And now that Alderi has served as an adviser to the Government’s ‘Luz para Todos’ (Light for All) programme, there are hopes that it will influence national policy, too. – Martin Wright

Hydro worth a dam?

There’s a huge amount at stake on the Madeira river. As the largest tributary of the Amazon, it’s seen by Brazil’s energy planners as a vital resource for hydropower. Giant dams at Jirau and San Antonio, slated to deliver in excess of 3,000 megawatts each by 2013, have been described as the top priority in the drive to meet the country’s electricity needs. But the opposition, it’s clear, just won’t go away.

However much the Government tries to minimise it, the displacement of indigenous forest dwellers is one flash point. Protests have already held up construction at Jirau, where cost estimates are spiralling away from the original $5.3 billion budget. Flooding could be greatly aggravated, as the Government of neighbouring Bolivia has complained, by the accumulation of huge quantities of sediment normally carried down by the flow of the Madeira.

Environmental disruption in the construction phase could be substantial, with massive equipment and teams of workers coming in. The contractors have already incurred penalty fines over incidents of illegal forest destruction and fish killed by dynamite. More fundamentally, the dams risk upsetting the breeding cycles of catfish and other species by obstructing their way upstream.

There’s a further dimension, too, which casts differing drivers of the future of the Amazon region into sharp relief. The scheme’s opponents have nightmares about what they fear is the developers’ dream: a dammed Madeira as a massive commercial waterway. A cost-effective way of getting soybeans out to export markets would make developmental pressure on the surrounding forests and tropical savannah even harder to resist. What price, then, the protection of its native peoples, its rich biodiversity, and its vital global role as a carbon sink? – Roger East

5 March 2010

Martin Wright and Roger East