Technical and Economic Aspects of Gridconnected Solar Photovoltaics in Brazil - Implementing Environmental and Resource Management - page 45

joint annual reports on the development of solar photovoltaics. In the 2006 edition
they forecasted the growth of the global photovoltaic market up to 110,000 million
€ (investments) and 60,000 MW/year (shipments) by 2025. And from that volume
they estimated the share corresponding to Latin America as 18%. In a section de-
voted specifically to Brazil the report noted that, despite its poor participation in
the PV market at the time (9 MW installed capacity according to Brazil's Energy
Ministry estimates), the country has huge potential and with the right policy mix
could become one of the PV market drivers in Latin America, achieving installed
capacities of 150 MW by 2010 and over 11,000 MW by 2025. This could lead in
the period 2006-2025 to the creation of about 100,000 related jobs, and a reduc-
tion of about 61 million tonnes of CO 2 , thanks to an amount of electricity gener-
ated by photovoltaics estimated at 23.7 GWh (EPIA and Greenpeace 2009).
Also in 2006, a bilingual joint report of the actors that took part in the SWERA
project in Brazil (UNEP, GEF, the SWERA team, and the Brazilian scientific in-
stitutions INPE, CPTEC, SONDA and LABSOLAR) was published under the title
“Atlas Brasileiro de Energia Solar / Brazilian Atlas of Solar Energy” (Bueno et al.
2006). The main results (available for public access free of charge) brought about
were: high resolution solar radiation digital and printed maps; generation of hourly
temporal series; and scenarios for the utilization of solar energy by using GIS
tools. In the main general map of the third section of that report, showing the an-
nual average of daily global solar irradiation that reaches the Brazilian territory,
one can observe that in spite of the climate diversity the global irradiation is fairly
uniform, and the annual mean of daily horizontal global solar irradiation in any
region of Brazil (1550-2350 kWh/m 2 *year) is much greater than those for most
European countries. The maximum solar irradiation value (6.5 kWh/m 2 *day) oc-
curs in the northern part of the Bahia state close to the border with the Piauí state,
an area of semi-arid climate with low rainfall and the lowest average amount of
clouds. Other maximum solar irradiation values are observed in the western area
of the Northeast region, including a portion of northern Minas Gerais, the North-
east of Goiás and the South of Tocantins, all of them semi-arid regions with stable
condition of low nebulosity. The lower global solar irradiation levels (4.25
kWh/m 2 *day the lowest) are found on the northern coast of the Santa Catarina
state, and on the shores of Paraná and São Paulo, all of them regions of temperate
climate. The average global solar irradiation levels calculated by macroregion are:
5.9 kWh/m 2 *day for the North-East; 5.5 kWh/m 2 *day for the North; 5.7
kWh/m 2 *day for the Center-West; 5.6 kWh/m 2 *day for the South-East; and 5.2
kWh/m 2 *day for the South. Regarding seasonal variability, it is lower than 40%
throughout all the country, although the variation between winter and summer is
smaller in the North region and greater in the South (the one with largest varia-
tion) and Southeast regions (Bueno et al. 2006).
In the section detailing application scenarios, the potential for deployment of
photovoltaics is considered huge, and two main applications are proposed:
• Coupling PV generation capacity to about 286 existing diesel power plants in
the Amazon region, which are not linked to the Brazilian interconnected system
of electricity distribution (and whose operators currently make use of a fuel