"Less than two weeks after its official groundbreaking ceremony, MidAmerican Solar and First Solar, Inc. marked another milestone at Topaz Solar Farms, (pictured) located in San Luis Obispo County, California. On Wednesday, the first solar panel was installed on what is the largest solar project under construction in the world. When complete, the 550MW (AC) project will include nearly 9m photovoltaic panels. The Topaz project will create about 400 construction jobs during its three-year construction period; will generate nearly $417m in local economic impact, the majority of which will be generated during construction; and will provide California with renewable electricity. .
Energy integration in South America will be a reality "in the medium to long term," driven by hydropower and drawing on Brazil’s experience, predicts Altino Ventura Filho, secretary of planning in this country’s Ministry of Mines and Energy.
Promoting the development of an integrated regional energy system, which will be "an example for the world," is a policy focus in Brazil, Ventura Filho said at the second Latin American hydropower summit last week in the southern city of São Paulo by Business News Americas.
The process has already begun among the Mercosur (Southern Common Market) countries ~ Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay ~ with binational projects and interconnections that "avert conflicts," promote energy security, and bring down costs because they more than compensate for investment in power lines and plants, Ventura Filho said.
And integration with Argentina will be given an enormous boost with the construction of two bi-national hydroelectric plants, Garabí and Panambí, on the Uruguay River, which forms part of the border between Brazil and Argentina and between Argentina and Uruguay. The plants will have a combined capacity of 2200 MW by the end of the decade.
Uruguay will be ready for full energy integration with Brazil’s national grid in November 2013, Gonzalo Casaravilla, president of UTE, Uruguay’s state electric utility said.
That will reduce the vulnerability of Uruguay’s energy supply, which depends on hydropower generated by just two rivers, meaning it is hit hard when rainfall is scarce, and the country must increase oil imports, Casaravilla pointed out.
"In winter, we need energy from Brazil, and in spring we have energy to offer," Casaravilla explained.
He forecast a major reduction in the cost of meeting the electricity needs of the country of just 3.3m people wedged between Brazil and Argentina.
South America, "the only energy self-sufficient region" thanks to the abundance of rivers, oil, natural gas, wind and sun, can optimise its resources by promoting integration in electricity systems between two groups of countries, Sinval Zaidan Gama, head of operations abroad in Brazil’s state-owned power company Eletrobras said.
The northern group comprises Guyana, French Guiana and Suriname, small territories on the north coast of South America.
The idea is to interconnect them and integrate them with the rest of the region, while developing their enormous hydropower potential, Gama said. Because they consume little energy, they would generate a large surplus to export to their neighbours.
The southern group would have far greater weight in the move towards regional integration, because it would include large Mercosur and Andean nations rich in water resources.
Harnessing the rivers in Peru, for example, would supply that country’s less-developed, energy-poor south, as well as arid northern Chile.
It would be "positive for both countries," and would also help "clean up Chile’s energy matrix," especially in the north, which depends mainly on fossil fuels, Gama said.
Chile, meanwhile, could export hydropower from its southern rivers to Argentina. Transmission of the energy would be cheaper and more efficient, because the power lines would stretch just 200 kilometres on average, compared to the thousands of kilometres of lines needed to reach the country’s large cities, the Eletrobras executive said.
In fact, Chile would benefit greatly from these interconnections because its hydroelectric potential is concentrated in the south of the country, while demand is highest in the centre ~ around the capital, Santiago, about 2,000 km to the north ~ and the even more distant copper-rich north, Gabriel Olguín, assistant manager of research in new technologies in Transelec, a private Chilean electricity transmission company, told IPS.
Transmission is the big problem in Chile, he said, because the unusual long, narrow shape of the country drives up the costs.
Among the Mercosur countries, integration is more advanced, with energy exchange agreements and binational hydroelectric dams like Itaipú (pictured), which Brazil shares with Paraguay; Yacyretá between Argentina and Paraguay; and Salto Grande, the first one built by two South American partners, Argentina and Uruguay, in the 1970s.
"Building a hydroelectric dam in one single country is already a complex undertaking" which becomes even more difficult if an agreement between two countries is required, due to the need to respect national regulations and autonomies, said Gama. But he added that it is a "natural and intelligent" way to maximise sustainable use of resources.
Eletrobras co-ordinates 117 Brazilian state-owned companies, and still controls a large part of electricity generation, transmission and distribution in South America’s giant.
The company was weakened during the wave of privatisation in the 1990s, but the government has strengthened it in the last few years, so that it can operate abroad, among other objectives.
Eletrobras has 42 projects in the pipeline in 16 countries, but "many are in the embryonic stage" and just 30 to 40% will actually pan out, Gama admitted.
Brazil has developed an integrated national grid connecting the power generators and distributors across the country, with the exception of a few isolated areas, like the Amazon jungle in the north, which is partly supplied by Venezuela. That makes it possible to save 20% in power generation, Ventura Filho said.
Those benefits will be extended throughout South America, where it is only natural to meet 65 to 70% of electricity demand by means of water resources, the Ministry of Mines and Energy official said.
Hydroelectricity has an advantage that is not frequently mentioned, he noted: investment is recovered during the period that the concession for the dam lasts, which is 30 years in the case of Brazil.
Then in the many remaining years of the dam’s useful life, operating and maintenance costs are very low, which keeps down energy costs for society for decades. There are dams that have already been operating for over a century, he pointed out.
But bi-national projects do not necessarily benefit both partners equally. Itaipú, the biggest hydropower dam in the region, has made Paraguay a country rich in hydroelectricity – which, however, hardly benefits the domestic market.
Even today, 28 years after the enormous hydropower complex came on-stream, it provides only 14% of Paraguay’s energy needs, Carlos Colombo, head of the committee managing the power lines that are being built to transmit electricity from Itaipú to Greater Asunción along a 350-km power line to be completed in 2013 said.
The power line, which will cost $555m, financed by a Mercosur fund and by the Itaipú power plant, will mark the start of "a new era" in Paraguay, he said, because it will help fuel the country’s industrialisation, will improve the quality of life of the local population, and will further bolster economic expansion, from the already high 15%t GDP growth in 2010.
The power line was not built earlier because "there was no state policy on this," Colombo told IPS. That has kept the landlocked country of 6.5m from taking better advantage of its part of the power generated by the dam ~ half of Itaipú’s 14,000MW capacity ~ to boost development.
Instead, most of its share has been exported at a low price to Brazil. ~ IPS
Energy integration in South America will be a reality "in the medium to long term," driven by hydropower and drawing on Brazil’s experience, predicts Altino Ventura Filho, secretary of planning in this country’s Ministry of Mines and Energy.
Australia has enough identified gas resources, excluding shale gas, to maintain current production rates for 184 years according to the Minister for Resources and Energy, Martin Ferguson (pictured).
Releasing the Australian Gas Resources Assessment 2012 at the annual Australian Petr
Carbon emissions in the European Union's Emissions Trading System (ETS) fell by more than 2% in 2011 but an oversupply of permits key to driving greener energy use worsened, European Commission data showed on Tuesday.
The glut in pollution permits has grown to 900m, data showed, whi
Sluggish US electricity consumption has yet to return to the level seen in 2007 as effects of the 2008 recession linger for utilities and power producers, according to industry data.
Warmer-than-normal winter weather again depressed power use in the first quarter compared to 2011,
Japan’s government took control of Tokyo Electric Power Co., the center of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and agreed to provide ¥1 trillion ($12.5bln) as part of the nation’s largest bailout since the rescue of the banking industry in the 1990s.
Mild weather patterns in the Australian state of Victoria resulted in improvements in service levels in 2010 according to figures released this month by the Essential Services Commission of Victoria
. In its last report (all future reports will be handled by the Australian Energy Re
Under normal weather and system conditions, New England’s (US) electric power supplies are expected to be adequate to meet regional demand this summer, according to ISO New England Inc., the operator of the region’s bulk power system and wholesale electricity markets.
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Alstom and Vietnam Electricity have partnered to establish a gas turbine reconditioning workshop in Phu My district in Ba Ria Vung Tau province along the southern coast of Vietnam. The partnership will be implemented as a joint venture and the corresponding agreement was signed in Hanoi. This will be the first reconditioning workshop in Alstom's network in Asia. The JV will create more than 140 new jobs for skilled Vietnamese workers and reflects EVN and Alstom's commitment to supporting the national drive for investment and employment in technically advanced industries.
Dubai: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan have signed a deal estimated at $1bln to build a dedicated cross-border electricity transmission line. The tetra partners and donors have been pursuing the development of electricity trade through the establishment of a Central Asia-South Asia Regional Electricity Market (Casarem) from 2008. Under the Central Asia, South Asia (Casa-1000) electricity trade, the construction of the link is essentially aimed at supplying 1300MW of surplus hydropower available during the summer months from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pakistan will import 1000MW of surplus electricity while Afghanistan will import 300 MW.
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Energy integration in South America will be a reality "in the medium to long term," driven by hydropower and drawing on Brazil’s experience, predicts Altino Ventura Filho, secretary of planning in this country’s Ministry of Mines and Energy. 
