- A pilot project in the Tapajós-Arapiuns Reserve is providing 24-hour electricity through an integrated system of solar panels and river-based hydrokinetic turbines.
- The project’s hydrokinetic turbines use specialized filter systems and slow-rotation grids designed to generate electricity without harming local river fauna.
- Roughly 990,000 people in the Brazilian Amazon still lack access to electricity despite the region hosting some of the world’s largest hydropower facilities.
When Brazil approved the construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric complex on the Xingu River, in Pará state, the megaproject promised to profoundly change the national and local energy landscapes, creating a large offer of clean energy to power industries, illuminate homes and bring development to isolated communities that historically had little to no access to power. However, nearly a decade after the operations of the fourth-largest hydropower facility in the world began in 2016, the reality is starkly different.
Vulnerable communities that highly depended on fishing have been severely economically affected, and many riverside families remain disconnected from the grid or pay some of the highest electricity bills in the country.
A study published in 2024 by researchers from the State University of Campinas in Brazil and Michigan State University in the U.S., funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), identified in a household survey covering 500 families in Altamira, Pará, that a vast majority of these families (86.8%) suffered a negative impact on electricity prices after the construction of Belo Monte. The research shows that not only did the “energy progress” promised in the past never materialize, but also that tariffs soared while communities living in the shadow of the Amazon’s largest dam still face blackouts and prohibitive costs.
Lower-income families in small communities in the Amazon region were hit the hardest, not only paying more for electricity, but also relying on diesel generators to cover outages, adding fuel costs to their burden.
“People are right under the transmission line, but the energy doesn’t come from that hydroelectric plant. … That energy goes to São Paulo and Rio, it goes straight there, it never passes through the Amazonian communities,” Emilio Moran, a prolific social anthropologist from Michigan State University who led the research, told Mongabay.
Moran, who has dedicated more than three decades of his career to researching environmental and social issues in the Brazilian Amazon, including the impact of large infrastructure projects, said that cheaper, more sustainable energy was “one of the big promises [of the Belo Monte project], which is why people said ‘yes, we want it,’” but that after almost 10 years of activity, that promise is still unfulfilled.
Moran and his colleagues have come to this conclusion after years of in situ research. In a comprehensive analysis published in 2019 by FAPESP, the researchers revealed that, despite massive investment, Altamira and neighboring towns near the hydropower facility faced fragile infrastructure, rising living costs and higher electricity tariffs than before the dam. For Moran, the exclusionary energy transition model imposed after the Belo Monte ignored territorial logic and the needs of affected populations, perpetuating inequality under the banner of “clean” energy.
“How is it possible that someone in São Paulo pays 300 reais [$57] a month for electricity, and in Altamira, next to Belo Monte, they pay 1,500 [reais, or almost $300]?,” said Moran, who believes that one of the main causes of this disparity is the lack of policies for distributed generation and community autonomy.
Belo Monte currently operates at a fraction of its potential, with just 23% of its installed capacity in 2024. According to data from the Global Energy Monitor, around 990,000 people in the Brazilian Amazon (3.5% of the rainforest population) still lack electricity. Of these, 19% live on Indigenous lands. As many communities near the dam still depend on small diesel grids, the costs of subsidies from the government can go as high as $2.5 billion a year and also resulted in 1.6 million tons of CO₂ emissions.
Energy networks
However, in the last few years, researchers have been working on an experimental project with local communities to create independent energy networks. The systems might be an answer to soaring energy prices in the Xingu Basin and elsewhere in the Amazon.
In the heart of Pará’s Tapajós-Arapiuns Reserve, a community-driven energy initiative, led by Moran with support from the Federal University of Western Pará (Ufopa), is creating a path for sustainable autonomy. Launched in 2023 as a pilot project in three riverside communities near Santarém, the effort provided off-grid energy systems powered by solar panels and river-based hydrokinetic turbines to these communities, reshaping local energy access, job opportunities and quality of life.
“The idea is exactly that: that we bring energy to contribute to improving the quality of life of these communities,” Lázaro Santos, one of the coordinators of the project and a professor at the Renewable Energy Laboratory of the Institute of Engineering and Geosciences of the university, told Mongabay.
The project, Santos said, operates in an integrated system with a mix of photovoltaic energy and power produced by turbines, which were funded by the University of Michigan and designed and produced by the mechanical engineering students Ufopa in partnership with a local manufacturing company.
“An off-grid solar panel system will operate intermittently. It doesn’t run 24 hours; it runs while the sun is passing, and that’s it,” he said. “As for the turbine, we can make use of it 24 hours. The turbine keeps spinning 24 hours a day, all year long.”
Santos explained that the turbines use the river’s energy. “We will take the energy contained in this mass of fluid moving in the river, and we will place the turbine in this flow, and it will use that energy and transform it into electrical energy,” Santos said.
According to him, the turbines are equipped with a filter system at slow rotation and a grid that avoids harming the river’s fauna and, while it can’t work in shallow rivers, the system works best in deep waters.
Oséas dos Santos, who lives in the community of Porto Rico, said the installation of these solutions has had a tremendous impact on his community, which heavily depended on diesel.
“Our generator used around 60 liters [15.8 gallons] per month. And here, diesel is 12 reais [$2.30] per liter,” he told Mongabay. “There were times when we had the money to buy diesel, but there was nowhere to buy diesel, only in Santarém. And from where we live, the boat leaves on Friday and arrives in Santarém on Sunday.”
Santos said that, when they had diesel, the community could use it only from 7-10 p.m. “We had a television, but we didn’t have a freezer or anything, because there wasn’t enough time to cool anything in that period,” he said.
Almost three years into the project, Santos celebrates. “[Now] We have a community freezer that serves the whole community. There’s a system there that works 24 hours, for the internet and for the community freezer. Anyone who has come to our community and seen our situation, it was really very precarious. But with this equipment, it improved 100%.”
The project also created an educational program to help communities run the energy system by themselves. And now, in the Porto Rico community, for instance, three people are prepared to maintain the equipment.
Evanilson Silva de Souza said he saw how the lives of his family and neighbors changed after the researchers installed the turbines in 2023. “Before the project, we had no access to electricity at all,” he told Mongabay. “We tried setting up the internet using a small battery system from another community, but it couldn’t support our equipment. We even bought a solar panel and a battery ourselves, but it only gave us about an hour of power before running out. That was how we lived.”
The collective freezer to store food is one of the highlights of the project, Santos said. “It’s not individual power for each family, but the system supports us well.” Communication also improved. “If someone got sick, we had to travel to another community to call Santarém and ask for help. Many times, people didn’t survive the wait. Now we can call an ambulance service from right here. It’s made a huge difference, thanks to God.”
This initiative, according to Moran, now serves nearly 200 people, with plans for expanding in the next couple of years.
Banner image: Locals take part in the installation of solar panels in the Porto Rico community, in the Brazilian Amazon. Image courtesy of Renato Chalu.
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Citation:
Cavallini Johansen, I. & F. Moran, E. (2024). Unfulfilled promises? Investigating the impact of the Belo Monte hydropower dam on water, energy, and food access in the Brazilian Amazon, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-13331, doi:10.5194/egusphere-egu24-13331, 2024
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