Electricity becomes currency
Oswaldo Sevá Filho sees 'crisis produced', with intention
of hiding a large income transfer operation

CARLOS LEMES PEREIRA

A thorn in the side of the status quo can also contribute to the search for formulas to overcome the crisis. And there is no one better to take on this mission than Arsenio Oswaldo Sevá Filho. A man who knew how to channel his qualifications as a professor at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Unicamp and his postgraduate studies in Energy Planning to overcome academic walls and scientifically support the crusades of non-governmental organizations engaged in questioning industrial projects and power plants with great impact on natural resources and the lives of the people affected.

It is along these lines that he tries to ideologically unravel what was underlying the “blackout era”. “Electricity is becoming a new and complex currency, to be traded on commodity and betting exchanges, treated with increasingly encrypted language and whose more strategic physical and commercial data circulate less and less in increasingly segregated social circuits”.

For Sevá Filho, “the embryo of this novelty” actually existed in Brazil for almost a century. “The intention is to hide a huge income transfer operation.” For example: “We, at home, or city halls, with street lights and squares, remitting interest, profits, royalties, with each switch flip, with each circuit breaker closing”. Referring to aluminum and other metals, he continues: “We at home, financing industries with high electrical consumption, which often export, also subsidized by us”.

The specialist is not satisfied with the delay in evaluating measures that are only now taking place: “It was not necessary to have genius or secret technologies ten, fifteen years ago, to induce changes in equipment, the use of heat from the sun, waste, and thermal machines and processes, in addition to pursuing the reduction of losses”. There are also barbs for the private sector: “It would have been the obligation of any decent company, long ago, to improve the use of electricity in intensive processes and, obviously, continually improve maintenance and operational safety”.

In the researcher's opinion, in a system as dependent on rivers as our case, “a 'produced' crisis like this is very favorable, immediately and in the long term, for those who sell diesel, LPG, piped natural gas and even worse fuels. , such as ore or petroleum coke, viscous residues, mineral coal, shale fines”.

Among the objectives of the drivers of this crisis, which are not yet clear enough, he risks: “They could include changing the very structure of production and transport of goods, the more effective capture of domestic and collective energy systems”. And regarding the effects, he points out: “We already have a worsening of the country's external accounts, as the closure of the national supply of diesel and LPG increasingly depends on imports. Of the natural gas, a small part is already imported from Argentina, and a much larger contractual volume is being paid for Bolivian gas than is actually consumed. “Also factor in the increase in imports of lamps, generators, exemptions for turbines, etc.”

'I miss the dictatorship' – The engineer does not doubt an imperative: “Those who own fuel and electricity have always played heavy politics, all over the world. And in every corner of Brazil. The people who are there now are an extension of the Bahian and Pernambuco Pefelist group, which dominates the MME, Eletrobras and the former state-owned and still state-owned companies, since the times of General Geisel”. And he intensifies the attack: “They miss the dictatorship and think it's normal to make the population and some businesspeople hell, as long as the very determined interests that support them are protected until the end. Naming them: the 'oil and gas sisters', the large foreign electrical companies, the manufacturers of turbines, power plants and power lines, and, of course, the large manufacturers, voracious devourers of electricity.”

A cue for his favorite line of argument: “Entities have had proposals for a long time and have been targets of ridicule, clichés and distrust for a long time, including here, in academia.” Recalling a sequence of national and international forums promoted by environmental NGOs, in which he participated, he warns: “The proposals that point out and demand other directions are old, even opening up other business opportunities, projects, technologies. But we are a type of people who think more about society than these crisis builders, who are planning other things, for themselves, and which for now cannot be left open.” And it carries the irony: “Business as usual, even to get out of the crisis”.

Little enthusiasm – The specialist confesses to having already been very close to the bodies that want to outline directions, scopes and concepts for our research. “This area of ​​S&T, as they say. It is important to maintain and encourage diversity and multidisciplinary themes.” However, he makes it clear: “I am not excited about research conducted by federal, state or municipal governments, but rather the ties that can be created and maintained with local, regional, other states' societies, humanity, in short. Nor do I have good references for research commissioned by existing companies and, even less, by those trying to implement high-impact projects.”

Even considering that with “this current trance of shortages and rationing being implemented, it is more difficult to propose new, life-saving things”, he takes the position: “I continue to demand caution. It is criminal, just because of the 'crisis', to lower environmental control standards and accelerate environmental licenses for bad and poorly located projects.”

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Far beyond the stereotype

Just to counter that institutional propaganda that the federal government has been promoting during prime time TV channels, in which an actor stereotypes an “oppositionist” who adheres to the “the worse the better” policy, Sevá Filho, asked Jornal da Unicamp to highlight a script that he presented in Brasília, at a workshop at the Management and Strategy Center of the Ministry of Science and Technology. Science and technology to take on the environmental problems of electricity is how he called the following document:

1. Evaluate in a retrospective, more complete and rigorous manner, in order to alleviate and correct situations of environmental degradation already caused or worsened by the installed capacity for supply and transmission/distribution of electricity.

2. Systematize existing information, perhaps scattered, and implement geophysical, chemical and biological measurement campaigns; organize, reorganize, interconnect services and networks to assess the situation of already formed hydroelectric reservoirs; particularly.

2.1 cases of proximity to urban areas upstream and downstream,

2.2 the problems of silting, sedimentation of organic material,

2.3 the problems of eutrophication, fermentation with gas emanation and chemical contamination of reservoirs or stretches of rivers with several reservoirs, for the purpose of adopting reform, protection, cleaning measures, changes in operating mode, decontamination, etc. in all these reservoirs.

3. Design, plan and instrument measurements of emissions of primary pollutants and concentrations of pollutants of all types in regions affected by thermoelectric plants of all types, in all operational situations, seasons and meteorological conditions. Especially in the case of fossil fuels with sulfur or hydrogen sulfide gas in their composition, and, in the case of the cycle formed by nitrogen oxides, volatile hydrocarbons, Ozone and other photo-chemical smog products in the lower atmosphere, in breathing air.

4. Develop, test and improve zoning and environmental control criteria for already problematic areas and areas for the protection of natural resources, specifically rivers or stretches of rivers, considered in public or private plans as subject to future hydroelectric use and stretches of rivers that are damaged or susceptible to, due to the large captures and large evaporative losses of cooling systems (thermoelectric plants, co-generation plants, industrial and community utility centers)

-to stabilize and reduce current pollution and risk

-to restrict the location of new works and electrical installations and new hydro-intensive processes (e.g. basins of Sorocaba, Piracicaba (SP), Paraíba do Sul (SP, RJ, MG), where the effects of hydroelectric plants are added , thermoelectric plants and hydro-intensive industries)

5. Design and improvements of collection, reuse and reprocessing chains of materials with high electricity content, in conventional industries and in specific, pilot, community installations, etc. Innovations and technological adaptations to reduce electrical consumption parameters in electro-intensive processes.

[for example, the production chains that supply chlorine and soda by electrolysis, some metallurgical products obtained in electric induction and electric arc furnaces, which supply ferroalloys of manganese and chromium, non-ferrous metals, such as lead, zinc, copper, aluminum, those that provide tin, and also high purity silicas (optical grade for fibers, voltaic grade for photoelectric cells and electronic grade for chips), all of them consuming thousands or tens of thousands of kilowatts x hour per ton of finished product ]

6. In principle, all schemes, procedures and accessories aimed at reducing the average consumption of lighting, thermal comfort, ventilation, refrigeration, reducing consumption and power required during peak hours, reducing reactive power, increasing power factor, the combination or complementation of end-use electrical energy with solar heat, with photo-electricity, with the use of process steam and motive steam, or aiming at better technical maintenance, less wear, better efficiency, — all in sense of progressively and widely reducing inefficiencies, losses and risks of shortages and breakdowns.