It is inevitable to describe the scene. Clapping, jumping, arms doing olé. Francisca de Oliveira Damião, 68, postponed her trip to the city, chose her clothes, put on earrings and put on makeup to welcome the team responsible for installing the solar energy system in her home.
“Now, this is going to be ice water,” she said, looking at the lamp above the kitchen and explaining that the refrigerator would be her first purchase.
Living for 30 years next to a narrow stream, on Marajó Island, in Pará, Dona Chica, as everyone calls her, raised her 12 children there. Until that day, July 25, 2022, she relied on lamplight, as she called the can with a piece of cloth soaked in fuel, which she used to light the house at night.
Brazil still has 1 million people disconnected from the electricity transmission network. For this group, the federal government launched Mais Luz para a Amazônia, a program that seeks to assist residents of isolated areas in the states of the Legal Amazon (Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Maranhão, Mato Grosso, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima and Tocantins).
Generation needs to be from clean sources—solar, wind, hydro or biomass. However, it is photovoltaics that has advanced the most. The implementation of the energy generation modules is the responsibility of the local distributor.
Within the program, Equatorial Pará has the most ambitious goal: to serve 154,000 across the state. In the Marajó archipelago, your challenge is doubled. The local population is essentially riverine. Thus, in addition to overcoming the geographic dispersion of people over large areas, a common challenge throughout the Legal Amazon, work also demands traveling long river distances.
Although there are villages and some cities, the normal thing in the region is to find a little house here and another there, on the banks of rivers, streams, streams scattered around.
In Marajó, initially, 9,000 systems were planned, of which 7,000 have already been installed. But new negotiations expanded the commitment to install a total of 25,400 systems in Breves, Portel, Oeiras do Pará, Curralinho, Melgaço and Bagre.
The six municipalities total 53.6 thousand kmtwoan area equivalent to the state of Rio Grande do Norte, which needs to be traveled by boat.
CGB Engenharia, from Pernambuco, the service provider responsible for the installation, created a floating task force with around 200 workers on board.
On the front line, there is a ferry, two boats, with lodgings and canteens, and another 20 speedboats. This group brings together the 120 professionals responsible for the metal structures that support the photovoltaic equipment next to each house. The ferry is a mini-industry, with inventories and an assembly line.
A few kilometers back, there is a second ferry, which carries the plates, batteries and other electrical and electronic inputs, in addition to another set with 12 speedboats. This team, with 95 employees, is responsible for the electrical part of the system, including installing all the wiring in the consumer’s home.
Some larger systems are foreseen, in schools, for example. However, most of the work is dedicated to the assembly of the so-called Sigfi (Individual Electric Power Generation System with Intermittent Source). This kit has a photovoltaic board, inverter and batteries to store the energy that will be used at night.
The modules have a capacity of 50 kWh (kilowatt hours), which allows connecting, for example, three lamps, a TV, a satellite dish, a refrigerator and a fan.
“I counted the days for this sign to get here,” says Ocilene Costa Cavalcanti, 23. She grew up in Belém and moved to the countryside of Melgaço when she married a local resident, Joelsio Oliveira da Cruz, 27.
She says she likes the quiet of the place. She shows the açaí trees she planted. She recalls with joy that she hunted —paca, armadillo, deer— until the birth of her son, who is now 1 year old. But she says she never got used to the lack of energy.
“It’s very difficult to live in the dark and without a refrigerator,” he says. “If you hunt, even salted, the meat doesn’t last long. If you beat an açaí, you need to eat it today, because tomorrow it will be sour.”
His mother, Dileia dos Passos da Costa, 42, who lives in a nearby house, says that solar energy will save another basic expense in the region, fuel costs.
“There’s no escaping the boat, because everything here is done on the boat, so you have to spend 2 liters of gasoline to buy 5 liters”, she says. “But the expense to have a little light was too much. To see a movie, I used 2 liters of diesel. Once, I did the math. To turn on the generator for one to two hours a night, it was R$ 300 a month. “
Mother, daughter and their husbands plant manioc to sell flour and do other odd jobs, but the guaranteed source of income comes from Auxílio Brasil.
The riverside people of Marajó are among the poorest communities in the country. The 17 municipalities of the archipelago are among those with the worst socioeconomic indicators, with Melgaço having the lowest HDI (Human Development Index) in Brazil. The indicator is in the range of 0.4, the same as countries like Ethiopia, in Africa, on a scale where 1 is the top of the ranking.
The report entered several houses, usually on stilts made with wood from trees taken from the native forest. Many had only one room, in which furniture was rare. Sometimes there was a table but no chairs. For sleeping, the most used is the hammock.
The stove does not always have a cylinder and many cook in the backyard, with firewood. Families are numerous. It is common for people in their 50s to declare that they have ten children or more.
Miguel Dias Moreira, 63, and Benedita Ferreira Carvalho, 54, for example, live in a two-room house with a teenager and two children. They live off the sale of açaí and fish, such as baby fish, gilthead seabream and piaba. Between May and June, shrimp enters.
Moreira was happy with the possibility of now having a refrigerator, to store the fish and be able to buy vegetables, something he is not able to do today. They count on Auxílio Brasil, but, even so, they were worried about the electricity bill that will come with the new solar system. This can turn joy into financial trouble.
To be entitled to the social tariff, that is, discount on the bill, consumers in general, not only in Mais Luz para a Amazônia, must be registered with CadÚnico (Cadastro Único) or BPC (Benefício de Prestação Continuada).
The fare in Equatorial for the Mais Luz para a Amazônia is R$ 44.88. Whoever falls under the social tariff rule pays R$ 18.25.
The couple Lidiane de Lima Gomes, 25, and Edevaldo da Silva Costas, 38, have already received the system in their house, which has only one room, on the riverbank, about an hour by boat from the city of Breves. As they are not in any program, they are not entitled to the social tariff.
They have five children. The oldest is seven years old; the youngest, with seven months. The family grows manioc and sells the flour, an income that fluctuates.
Once the distance is over and the installation is complete, the next challenge for the distributor comes, the maintenance of the systems and the delivery of the electricity bill.
Every four months, a new team from CGB Engenharia returns to the place where an installation was made. On site, it monitors the equipment and delivers a set of electricity bills, which must be paid over the next four months, until the new batch arrives. There needs to be someone at home to welcome the team.
Maria Raimunda dos Santos Alho, 77, was one of the first to receive the system, in September 2021. She remembers that she lived in the dark until she was 56 years old, when she bought a generator. But the equipment irritated her. “I would buy R$100 worth of gasoline and it wouldn’t last for a week. Then it broke down, and it had to be repaired”, she recalls. “With solar energy finally came a freezer.”
Satisfied with the change in her life, she paid the initial batch of bills with gusto, she recalls. But there was a failure to deliver the following bills.
In July of this year, she received eight at the same time, referring to the months of January to August. There is room to negotiate the payment, but she told the report that she did not know how she would settle the accounts, as there will be overlap with invoices from September to December.
The manager of the generation area at Equatorial Pará, Giorgiana Pinheiro, says that the company is monitoring different issues in this initial phase in Marajó. The distributor has already promoted, for example, collective efforts to include new consumers in CadÚnico or BPC. Delinquency is still high, but there is no cut in supply — and she says she believes the payment will settle in time.
“As a distributor, we take the energy, but my personal perception is that, in parallel, it would be important to have an integration of Mais Luz para a Amazônia with a broader social policy, which could help these communities to organize themselves to obtain income from from that access to energy.”
The Mais Luz para a Amazônia program was launched in 2020 and had its goals revised in 2021 — the deadline for compliance was extended from 2026 to 2030. The installation of the systems continues at a slow pace, according to data sent to the report by the Ministry of Mines and Energy .
Since the launch, investments have increased from R$ 3 billion to R$ 11.3 billion. The number of families that can be served rose from 82,000 to 219,000, and the total number of potential beneficiaries rose from 327,000 to 876,000.
However, only a fraction of the goals advanced. In August 2022, investments already made totaled BRL 403 million and the number of families served, 8,000, reaching 52,000 people.
The slowness was already expected, says engineer Donato da Silva Filho, founding partner of Volt Robotics. Donato coordinated a preliminary study on Mais Luz para a Amazônia, commissioned by the ICS (Instituto Clima e Sociedade) and the Forum for Renewable Energy in Roraima, with financial support from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.
According to him, Covid delayed the start of the program. The long distances to take and install the systems, the concentration of attributions in the distributors that, alone, are responsible for the entire process, from registration to installation, and even the unpredictable reactions of the beneficiaries, also weigh.
He says that it is common for the number of people served to multiply. Among riverside dwellers, for example, when a family enters the registry, not infrequently, a relative already builds a house next door. The team of installers arrives at the site and is faced with a new family to be registered, which will require the return of another team to take care of the new task.
“The decentralization of the process would help to speed up the program”, he says. “The communities themselves could register and pass it on to the distributors, just to cite an example.”
However, regardless of speed, reports from various communities collected in the study indicate that switching from a fuel-powered generator to solar energy brings immense benefits.
Indigenous people said, for example, that generators break down with a certain frequency and, while it is not possible to repair them, pumping and water treatment are compromised. The community consumes contaminated water and many people get sick.
Among riverside dwellers, the possibility of cheap solar energy was pointed out as a way to improve income, as it is possible to store fish in times of abundance, without having to sell everything cheaply because there is no fridge or freezer to store.
A balance on the economic advantages of solar energy and its relationship with diesel systems are the topics of the next report. The series Energia na Amazônia goes to Boa Vista, in Roraima, the only capital in the country that is not connected to the national electricity system and depends on fossil fuels.
The series of reports Energia na Amazônia was produced with the support of Rede Energia e Comunidades.
