Brazil’s Solar Growth Soars, Eyes 200 GW by 2050

Brazil needs to rapidly scale its decarbonization efforts to become a net-zero economy by 2050, according to New Energy Outlook: Brazil, released by BloombergNEF (BNEF). The report builds on the results of BNEF’s flagship New Energy Outlook 2024 and examines Brazil’s decarbonization trajectory using bottom-up modeling across the power, transport, industry, and buildings sectors through 2050.

BloombergNEF report found, “Brazil’s Hard-to-abate sectors like steel, aluminum, cement, and chemicals face difficulties decarbonizing in an economics-driven scenario without further policy intervention. Generous net-metering legislation has fueled a small-scale solar boom in Brazil. In the base-case scenario, installed solar capacity reaches 200 gigawatts by 2050.”

Clean Power

The report elaborated, “Despite Brazil’s progress to date in decarbonizing power, under the ETS, clean power still accounts for 38% of emissions reductions between today and 2050. Prioritizing the rollout of mature technologies, such as wind and solar, continues to be a ‘no regrets’ policy option in the short term, based on an economic perspective.”

Vinicius Nunes, lead author of the report, said, “Brazil has a clean electricity mix, which puts the country in a good position to decarbonize its economy by electrification. However, half of final energy use today still comes from fossil fuels. Some hard-to-abate sectors like aviation and steel require different solutions, and because of that, there is no net zero in Brazil without bioenergy, green hydrogen and carbon capture.”

This research forms part of a series of regional and sector reports diving deeper into results from BloombergNEF’s global New Energy Outlook report. Report summaries are available at about.bnef.com/new-energy-outlook-series. The report also draws on BNEF’s latest energy and climate scenarios to analyze Brazil’s energy-related emissions, which account for half of the country’s total emissions; agriculture (excluding land use), land-use change and forestry contribute to the remaining half. Within Brazil’s energy sector, transport accounts for 53% of emissions, followed by industry at 25%, power and energy combined at 11%, and buildings at 6%.

Investment Required To Meet Net Zero

BloombergNEF report highlighted, “Under BNEF’s Net Zero Scenario (NZS), which maps a path to net-zero emissions globally by 2050, the investment required for the country to meet net zero is $6 trillion between the present and mid-century. Yet this is only 8% higher than the spending required under BNEF’s base-case Economic Transition Scenario (ETS), which describes how the energy sector evolves as a result of cost-based technology changes and assumes no additional policy interventions are made. Two-thirds of NZS investment is on the energy demand side, particularly in electric vehicle sales.”

It further elaborated, “Brazil’s net-zero future requires various technologies, with electrification as the primary driver in the country’s efforts to decarbonize. From 2040 onward, electrification has become the leading force behind emissions abatement, mainly in decarbonizing road transport, buildings, and industry. Electrification alone is responsible for 55% of emissions reductions between now and 2050, compared with a ‘no transition’ scenario in which decarbonization and energy efficiency remain stagnant.”

It also mentioned, “Additional key net-zero pathways include carbon capture and storage (CCS), hydrogen, and bioenergy, which together account for 27% of emissions reductions, mainly in end-use sectors. Transport accounts for over half of 2050 hydrogen demand. Shipping and aviation combined reach 2.3 million metric tons of hydrogen demand in Brazil in 2050, although the fastest-growing category is for hydrogen as a cracking agent to produce bio-based sustainable aviation fuels.”