بازسازی بخش برق در برزیل و اثرات آن بر بهره وری انرژی و فعالیت های تحقیق و توسعه

Since the mid-nineties Brazil has implemented significant changes in the country's power sector, including privatization, introduction of competition and the creation of regulatory agency. As reform started in Brazil traditional support to energy efficiency and energy research and development suffered a discontinuation, budget cuts and re-definition of roles of the public agents in charge. At the same time, new regulatory measures and the creation of a national public interest fund have helped to maintain and potentially enhance the country's effort to promote energy efficiency and investments in energy R&D. This paper analyses the impacts of these changes in the areas of energy efficiency and energy research and development and argues for an increased role of developing countries to provide solutions for a meeting energy demand requirements more suitable to their internal markets.

Radical change is required in the current energy system worldwide if sustainability is to be effectively pursued and incorporated in policy decisions and future technological choices. Developing countries, in particular, are facing additional and significant challenges with regards to continuing their economic development and the need to increase access and the level of energy services to their populations. More efficient and clean technologies, and economic strategies to commercialize them can help provide the solution to these challenges both to industrialized and developing countries (Williams, 2001; Patterson et al., 2002). At the same time, power sector reforms have posed new challenges and opportunities to enhance energy efficiency and R&D activities in some developing countries but may also have aggravated the capability to innovate and promote domestically conceived solutions. Developing countries have little tradition in investing in R&D in general and in energy R&D in particular. Often R&D efforts are adaptive following externally developed technologies (see, for example, Intarakumnerd et al., 2002). Total national expenditures in R&D in developing countries hardly represent a significant share of their GDPs. In 1994 the average was about 0.65% in developing countries and 3% in industrialized countries (Hadjimanolis and Dickson, 2001). India and Brazil, for example, dedicate a little over 0.5% of their GDP to R&D activities,1 much less than South Korea and several industrialized countries (Runci, 1999). In per capita terms total Brazilian R&D expenditure in year 2000 were US$ 80.40, more than ten times smaller than the US per capita expenditure and five times less than South Korea (MCT, 2002).2 Nevertheless, several developing countries have over the years created and supported research institutions with the purpose of providing technical (and in fewer cases, scientific) assistance to the existing electricity utilities. During the last decade several countries started the introduction of structural reforms within their electricity industry. The international experience has demonstrated that these changes towards a more competitive and market oriented industry has strengthened the trend of falling investments in energy efficiency and research and development, at least in the early stages of reforms (Sioshansi, 1995; Surrey, 1996; Dooley, 1998; Dooley and Runci, 1998; Kammen and Margolis, 1999). Very few countries have included provisions to secure and enhance activities and resources in these areas (USAID, 1997; Dubash, 2002; IEI, 2003). Introduction of power sector reforms had immediate implications on the support for R&D and energy efficiency. In several developing countries public agencies and public research institutions were the major and only supporters of energy research and activities related to energy efficiency. After reforms they had their roles and mandates revised. The pursuit of greater competition, the creation of smaller and unbundled utilities and, in some cases, foreign private ownership, may cause developing countries to rely strongly on internationalized markets for R&D to provide solutions to their particular problems. Although most of the expected increase in energy demand will occur in developing countries, up to now very few industrialized countries concentrate about 95% of the world's investment in energy R&D (Dooley, 2002). The obvious implications of this usually high dependence on first world technologies, or solutions tailored for global markets, are that problems or opportunities specific to developing countries may not receive appropriate and adequate R&D attention. Worldwide individual utility investments in R&D have decreased since the early 1990s, but have not disappeared. In the US, the 112 largest investor-owned utilities, which perform over 93% of non-federal R&D, reduced their R&D expenditures from $778 million in 1993 to $486 million in 1996. Investments in energy R&D in the US represent about 0.5% of total annual sales, which is far less than the values observed in other industries, such as Drugs and Medicine, Communications (over 10%), chemicals (4%) (Margolis and Kammen, 2001). Deregulation encourages utilities to reduce overall investment in energy R&D because of the competitive pressure to cut costs and the risk that ratepayer-financed investments will become public rather than proprietary assets. Also in the US, utility spending on DSM has seen similar trends. Total utility DSM spending peaked in 1993 at about $3 billion and declined to about half that amount by 1998. For developing countries in particular, reforms have created new challenges to the public sector, which has to understand how markets operate, seek funding mechanisms and develop criteria for allocating funds (both public and private). This process meant a re-definition of the role of public agents and sometimes required the creation of new institutional structures. All this demands that energy policy makers understand how energy efficiency and R&D activities take place in the supply and demand side of the energy system, which has now several operators, including private entrepreneurs. New energy policies need to take these changes into account and create regulatory incentives and other mechanisms to support activities related to energy efficiency and R&D. The energy challenges facing Brazil call for a pivotal role for technologies and technology policies in finding, transforming and utilizing energy resources in an efficient, cost-effective and environmentally sound manner. This paper intends to analyse the Brazilian experience in implementing provisions in regulation and legislation to promote energy efficiency and R&D in a more competitive environment.