Brazil & Southern Cone - August 2012 (ISSN 1741-4431)

Uruguay and Brazil are advancing rapidly towards an energy cooperation agreement “unprecedented at continental level” according to Ramón Méndez, Uruguay’s energy secretary. Uruguay’s industry, energy and mining minister Roberto Kreimerman was scheduled to travel to the Mercosur presidential summit in Brasília on 31 July for further talks. Kreimerman has been holding weekly videoconferences with Brazil’s deputy mining and energy minister, Marcio Zimmerman, to put together the deal, with the support of 20 technicians.

The idea is to exchange 500 megawatts (MW) of energy daily, according to Méndez, thereby optimising the energy flow in both countries and reducing costs.  Uruguay expects to have a surplus in wind energy and biomass by 2015, which it will send on to Brazil.

Uruguay is heavily dependent on hydro power, which is subject to extreme weather like drought, and it has basically fully exploited its hydro capacity. It continues to purchase energy from Brazil, which comes in via the Rivera converter station. Built in the late 1990s, the Rivera station has a limited capacity of only 70MW, which is insufficient to projected future demand. Uruguay’s power transmission utility (UTE) has commissioned another HVDC station at the Melo substation to provide an additional link to the transmission system in Brazil.

Soya: Miguel Carbajal, president of Uruguay’s association of seed suppliers (Ausid) expects record planting in 2012/2013 on the back of a surge in global soya prices, which in July topped US$600 a tonne. Carbajal expects soya to replace sorghum in some areas, while it is also extending to departments in central Uruguay that are not traditional agri areas, including Durazno and Flores.