Brazil imports energy from Uruguay, Argentina

The intense heat assailing Rio de Janeiro in the first weeks of January, coupled with the problems facing  transmission lines led Brazil to import electric energy from Uruguay and Argentina on an emergency basis, in order to increase its internal reserves available.

Luiz Eduardo Barata, director-general with the National Operator for the Electric System (ONS), told Agência Brasil that the move was motivated not by a shortage, but by electric power and power reserves. “We’d have the conditions to meet the demand with no need to import energy from these two countries. But, because of the reserve issue, we filed a request and were supplied for slightly more than two hours. After the moment of greatest demand was over, we interrupted the exchange.”

Luiz Eduardo Barata - Fabio Pozzebom/Ag. Brasil

Mutual help

“We requested an emergency import from Argentina and Uruguay, as part of a deal with the two countries to help each other in cases of major disturbance,” Barata explained.

He stressed “the importance of the exchange with the neighboring countries,” as the international energy connections “are extremely favorable to the increase in the confidence in the system, as they make mutual help possible.”

“In this case in particular, the exchange favored Brazil, but we were the ones providing help for the Argentinian system several times due to outages in transmission lines. This kind of assistance is not conducted in exchange for payment, but energy credit,” he went on to say.

Record output

On January 22, Brazil reached the highest level of energy production in two decades, due to the high increase in consumption, brought about by the intense heat.