Community Solar in Brazil: The Cooperative Model Context and the Existing Shared Solar Cooperatives Up to Date
Abstract
In Brazil, community solar only became possible in 2015 by the revision of National Regulation REN 482/2012 by the National Energy Regulatory Agency ANEEL, which regulated remote distributed generation (DG) and shared DG such as cooperatives, consortia and shared condominia. This paper focus on the community shared solar model that refers to the cooperatives model, aiming to present its context in Brazil today, and the existing solar photovoltaic (PV) cooperatives operating in the country to date. Currently, there are ten shared DG cooperatives registered at ANEEL, and six of them are solar cooperatives using distributed PV generators, three use hydropower and one uses biomass. From these six shared solar cooperatives, one of them is located at the northern region of the country, two of them are located at the west central region, other two at the southeastern and one at the southern part of the country. Each of these cooperatives approaches and business models adopted are presented in this paper. A map with their location and pictures from their PV power plants will be integrated in this paper final version.