The South American country has jumped from 16th to 6th place among producers to become a wind powerhouse in just a decade

A recent report published by the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) has highlighted Brazil’s incredible rise as an emerging global wind powerhouse. Thus, the Amazonian country has managed, in just 10 years, to reach sixth place in the world ranking, after leaving fifteenth place. With this, Brazil currently has 21.5 gigawatts of installed capacity compared to 1 gigawatt it had in 2011; achieving a consensus that wind energy is the second source of energy that contributes the most to the country’s energy mix. Although China’s wind power leadership, with 310 GW of installed wind power capacity, is light years behind the rest.

Furthermore, during 2021 Brazil occupied the Top 5 markets with the highest installed capacity along with China, the United States, Vietnam and the United Kingdom. Something that was possible thanks to the installation of 3 GW of wind capacity to reach the milestone of 20 GW of installed capacity achieved during 2021, equivalent to 70% of the total capacity in all of Latin America.

Onshore wind installations occupy much of Brazil’s prominence as a wind power (Source:GWEC)

Brazilian wind power and its investment plan

In all, and according to the Brazilian Wind Energy Association (ABEEólica), the sector would experience investments worth 5.8 billion dollars in 2022 with an installation portfolio close to 5 GW for this year. In addition, the State Energy Development Office (EPE) estimates that between 2020 and 2029, investments worth $59 billion will be made for centralized power generation and $20 billion for the power transmission and distribution network.

According to the Global Wind Energy Council report, investors have their eyes on Brazil as one of their preferred markets, based on the multiple applications for offshore wind project licenses that would accumulate a total of 80 GW once installed. While this may seem like a considerable figure, Brazil’s technical wind potential is around 700 GW of capacity; which, although it seems unattainable today, demonstrates the possibility of real development of new wind power.

The Brazilian renewable energy market continues to rise

In addition to this news, a year ago we learned that Brazilian photovoltaics had reached 10GW of installed capacity after installing 2GW of capacity last year. According to media outlets such as PV Magazine, strong growth within the distributed generation PV segment (which includes all installations under 5 MW in size and operating under the net metering regime), along with increasing large-scale bilateral power purchase agreements, is responsible for this significant progress in Brazilian PV.