Brazil preps large-scale battery storage auction for 2025

Brazil’s Ministry of Mines and Energy is set to open a public consultation on a capacity reserve auction aimed exclusively at contracting battery storage, to be held in 2025. According to the minister of the department, Alexandre Silveira, in addition to that auction, the government also intends to hold the procurement exercise that has already been planned to contract capacity reserves for thermal and hydroelectric power sources, in 2024.

“We will launch the public consultation [regarding the proposed auction involving batteries] in the next few days,” said the minister. “The purpose of the battery auction is to boost battery technology in Brazil, to try to bring Huawei and other large battery producers, mainly from China and other countries, to be able to bring technology to Brazil.”

The minister said that, in the medium term, batteries will be important to accommodate intermittent-generation energy sources such as wind and solar power – including reducing energy costs – but that the government does not want to do this in a hasty manner or give in to pressure.

“If we don’t need to be hasty, and be run over and, consequently, burden the consumer, we won’t be,” said Silveira. “The electricity sector is a huge patchwork of big interests, especially in generation. And there is often a lot of pressure to do one thing here and another there faster because there is always someone winning. But the government only has one focus: the cost of energy and energy security.”

According to Silveira, the country has enough contracted energy to meet demand, even given the historic drought scenario. The minister highlighted the role of thermal plants that are being activated at a time of low availability of hydroelectric generation.

“We have enough contracted energy so there is no risk due to [a] lack of auction,” he said. “We want to hold a power auction to ensure energy security for the coming years and even plan for the next six, seven years. The planning already indicates a need to double the thermal portfolio by 2031. We have 20 GW today. Unfortunately, we will have to double the thermal fleet due to climate effects. The temperature is rising. Brazil had never consumed an average 105 GW of energy in an afternoon before September of this year [2024]. The usual average is 85 GW. We consumed 105 GW, which shows that we had all the air conditioning units in Brazil on and the need for energy is increasingly fluctuating in Brazil.”

The minister also said that he had requested a contingency plan to guarantee the operation of the system during the summer.

From pv magazine Brasil.