The year begins with new challenges for multinational Engie Brasil Energia, the Brazilian market leader in renewable energy. In addition to the generation and transmission fronts, where the company has multi-billion-dollar projects underway, the priority is to advance the sale of energy on the free market, which is now also open to small businesses, with electricity bills starting at R$10,000.
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The company’s CEO, Eduardo Satameni, informed that of the three-year R$14 billion investment plan announced in 2023, the majority, about R$6 billion, will be invested in 2024. There are two large wind farms and a solar power plant in Northeast, transmission line. The total generation will reach 2 GW and will increase Engie Brasil Energia’s generation by 25%.
Moreover, ENGIE remains a reference for social investments in Brazil. One of the programs it is developing is Parcerias do Bem, where it invests in projects with partner companies. At the end of last year, Satameni led an event at the company’s headquarters in Florianópolis, where some examples of this work in Brazil were demonstrated. Find out more in Satamine’s interview below.
Engie announced a major three-year investment plan in 2023. How much is this plan and how much does it plan to invest in 2024?
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We can say that we have a committed investment plan for the next two or three years worth about R$14 billion. Next year, we will invest approximately R$6 billion, mostly in wind farms.
There is a wind farm in its final phase, the Santo Agostinho Wind Park, in Rio Grande do Norte. Another wind farm is under construction, Serra do Assuruá, in Bahia. And we have the Assú Sol photovoltaic park, which is a large solar park in Rio Grande do Norte.
In total, in terms of generation, we are talking about an increase of 2 GW with these investments. For a company with 8.2 GW, we are talking about 25% growth in these two years.
Furthermore, we have started the Asa Branca project, which is a transportation line between the states of Bahia, passing through the state of Minas Gerais and going to Espírito Santo. It is a line one thousand kilometers long, with some substations. The investment will be in the range of R$ 3.5 billion. Therefore, a large volume of investments will take place in 2024 and a small amount in 2025.
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With these new investments, what is the company’s position among the largest generators in Brazil??
– We are the largest renewable energy company in the country and we will certainly continue this leadership after this growth. We are not the largest private generator, which is currently the position of Eletrobrás. But it needs to divest its coal and fossil generation assets (it is a natural gas generator) to become a 100% renewable energy company.
Did Engie stop generating natural gas?
-We are not born. We sold the Willian Arjuna factory about three years ago. Then we finished selling the coal plants and then we stopped getting fossil fuels completely.
Do you have projects to generate hydroelectric power??
– we do not have. Today, in Brazil, no one is building a (large) hydroelectric station. It is possible to build small hydroelectric plants, but that is outside our radar. The last time we acquired hydropower plants was in 2017, the Cemig plants were relaunched.
What we have now seen is that the state companies whose concessions are ending, such as Koppel, Cemig and Eletrobras themselves, have found another way to implement these renewals, through privatization to increase the value of the companies.
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This was done with Eltrobras and Coble. Simig was in the process, but then they talk about her uniting to pay off Minas Gerais’s debt to the federation, and we don’t know if that will happen. It goes a little against the normal flow of things, but it can happen. So, in hydropower, we will only grow if we acquire existing assets.
A new rule for joining the free energy market came into force this year. Small businesses, whose electricity bills start at R$10,000 per month, can participate. What are the company’s expectations for this market?
-Our expectations are high. So much so that we started investing more in the media, and in mass campaigns to reach a wider group of people. The number of companies that can join this market has now increased by 10 times. We had about 15 thousand and now we have about 150 thousand potential buyers in this free energy market, with the full opening of the high voltage market.
Therefore, we need mechanisms to reach potential customers in a faster and more efficient way. Therefore, we invested a lot in communications, digitalization and partnerships so that we can reach this customer quickly, efficiently and at the lowest possible cost.
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ENGIE also has a strong presence in the field of energy transmission. How do you evaluate this market?
– We have great growth prospects with transportation lines. Today, we have three assets and we will build the fourth major asset, the Asa Branca project. This positions us as a relevant player. The market remains highly fragmented, with the exception of state-owned enterprises.
But we’re starting to have a little bit more of a voice in this sector of the industry, and in the next two or three years, transportation should represent a significant segment of growth for the company, always through auctions.
The company also stands out in social projects. One of them is Parcerias do Bem, which invests in social projects throughout Brazil with partner companies. How did this initiative come about?
We had some stages in developing social responsibility within the company. We’ve always had that social aspect very prominent in the company because whenever we built hydropower plants, it had a social impact, it had an impact on the population, it had an environmental impact and there was a need for compensation.
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Therefore, we have always had a lot of social work near our hydroelectric power stations. Then we started establishing cultural centers. We have found a way to leave a legacy for this community as well, but that has become a bit much in our opinion.
So how can we grow, get a little closer to our customers, serve them better and engage them in social enterprise? This is how we thought about forming partnerships, about being partners with our clients in social projects.
The “Social Products” project appeared around 2019. In 2020, with the outbreak of the epidemic, we began implementing “Women in Our Region”, which targets the specific situation of women during the epidemic phase. At that point, domestic violence increased a lot because men could not leave every home.
So, how can we value women and give them dignity? That’s when Lucien Naparetti (Director of People, Operations and Sustainability at ENGIE) presented the (Partnerships for Good) project at the end of 2020.
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In 2021, we expanded to grow. Then we went from two to three projects to more, and today we have nearly 70 projects with our partners. These partners are customers, suppliers, competitors, and others. No matter who you are, if you want to do good in a responsible and sustainable way, we are your partner.
Why are there so many companies from Santa Catarina in this group of Engie social partners?
– This happens because when we started sharing information about social responsibility, it was through the relationship with FIESC (Federation of Industries of Santa Catarina), when we launched a training program for companies in the state.
We launched this six or seven years ago because, at that time, we looked at companies in Santa Catarina and noticed that only a very small number of them had fully invested their incentive resources. We usually spent more than our incentive resources (those percentages allowed by law for donations to the Children and Adolescence Fund, the Elderly Fund, and others).
When we identified this, one of the programs we implemented was to educate government companies on how to use resources for social purposes. We then formed a partnership with Fiesc and launched Capacitar.
We have created training manuals for companies and social enterprises so they can use those resources, just as a project registers with various government bodies to access incentive resources. This created this chain of goodness and many companies from Santa Catarina ended up joining us and making us a reference in a socially responsible company.
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