Sustainability Indicators for the Assessment of Strategic Studies of the Brazilian Power Sector

摘要

Since 1980, the Brazilian power sector has developed mid and long-term strategic planning studies that have systematically included environmental and social aspects in several ways. Performance indicators have also been consistently used in many planning studies, such as demand-offer evaluations. However, the inclusion of performance indicators in social and environmental studies of strategic planning is a recent innovation for Brazil, having been initiated by EPE in 2005. Based on the adoption of sustainable development goals, countries and companies are increasingly taking up indicators in environmental performance evaluations that lead towards sustainability. In Brazil, the power sector is exerting strong efforts in order to combine and integrate environmental and social aspects into strategic planning studies. Using indicators to evaluate both the profile and sustainability performance of the national power system while taking into account the new regulatory requirements, these studies have been an important decision making tool. This paper discusses the approach used by the Brazilian power sector to incorporate sustainability indicators as important tools for assessing the performance of the system expansion planning. Several indicators have recently been proposed by the Brazilian power sector for different stages of the strategic decision-making process. These studies include the Brazilian Energy Matrix and the Long-Term Expansion Plan - taking into account several sources for electricity generation and transmission system interconnection, and the two subsequent planning cycles of the Ten-Year Expansion Plan (2006-2015 and 2007-2016). Indicators have been used in such studies to analyse project alternatives that will meet future needs for expanding the supply, involving the planning of power plants and transmission lines to be established throughout the country over a ten-year period. For each one of these studies, a set of sustainability indicators, both environmental and social, have been proposed and used in order to provide an assessment of the performance of the strategic planning towards sustainable development, i.e., taking into account the assessment of the sustainability of the natural resource base and the social sustainability. By presenting the social and environmental indicators proposed by each strategic planning study (with different time horizons and main goals) the paper intends to analyse these instruments as additional alternatives for including the sustainable development objectives in the earlier stages of planning.