Brazil

Heavy rains recently triggered floods in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul state when Lake Guaíba and the Taquari River and Uruguay River overflowed, reaching more than 5.30 meters and affecting more than 1.95 million people. The death toll stands at 143, with 125 still missing. The authorities still have yet to assess the losses from submerged or affected PV plants.

Linde says its White Martins unit will build a second electrolyzer to produce green hydrogen in Brazil, while Sunfire has launched a front-end engineering and design study (FEED) for a new 500 MW hydrogen project.

Brazil’s cumulative installed PV capacity exceeded 41 GW at the end of March, with utility-scale plants accounting for 13 GW and distributed-generation resources representing 28 GW of the total.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) says developers installed 345.5 GW of solar throughout the world in 2023. China mainly drove the surge, accounting for nearly three-quarters of all new renewable energy, but IRENA says more equitable growth will be needed to hit 2030 deployment targets.

A heat wave drove Brazil’s power demand up to a record high of 102 GW last week. However, it also affected solar power generation and pushed PV module operating temperatures to up to 60 C.

DNV has started working on blending feasibility studies in the Canadian province of British Columbia, while the US Department of Energy has announced $750 million in funding for 52 hydrogen projects across 24 states.

Solar accounted for 17.4% of Brazil’s electricity mix last week. PV systems up to 75 kW in size represent around 50% of the total capacity.

In a new monthly column for pv magazine, the International Solar Energy Society (ISES) reports that Brazil currently has more than 85% renewable electricity, mainly hydropower, but with rapidly growing shares of solar and wind power. With 2.3 million rooftop PV systems installed so far and more than 90 million consumer units still available to go solar, favourable energy policies and cheap PV are encouraging the fast uptake of solar in the country.

PV module imports fell by 1% year on year in Brazil in 2023, according to a new report from solar consultancy Greener.

Brazil has pushed past 38 GW of total installed PV capacity, with around 26.3 GW consisting of distributed-generation solar systems.