With collaboration from Guilherme Pereira*
Recent events involving Venezuela have reignited a debate that, in Brazil, is still often handled in a fragmented or excessively ideological way: the direct relationship between energy, infrastructure, and national sovereignty.
Revisiting Daniel Yergin's The New Map in this context makes it clear that the energy transition cannot be understood solely as an environmental or technological agenda. It is, above all, a strategic agenda of power, security, and decisional autonomy.
The Venezuelan experience demonstrates that sovereignty is no longer a strictly international political concept. In the contemporary world, it has come to depend directly on a country's ability to organize, protect, finance, and modernize its critical infrastructure.
States that lose this capacity become functionally vulnerable, opening the door to external interventions that are not justified by ideological discourse, but by material criteria: efficiency, control, and operational capacity.
Historically, every great power has consolidated its position through control of a central energy source. Coal sustained the British Empire and its industrial navy.
Oil structured the American century, enabling mobility, large-scale industrialization, and geopolitical projection. In the 21st century, the axis of power shifts to electricity, storage, data, and computing capacity.
This is not a historical rupture, but an update of the same principle: whoever controls energy controls growth, stability, and decision-making capacity.
The energy transition, therefore, does not eliminate the geopolitics of energy. It expands it and makes it more sophisticated. Beyond oil and gas, resilient electrical systems, large-scale storage, critical minerals, grid digitization, and the integration of energy, mobility, and urban infrastructure become central to the national strategy. Environmental discourse exists, but the prevailing logic of the major powers is strategic.
The digital economy, often perceived as immaterial, is profoundly physical. Data centers, cloud computing, telecommunications, artificial intelligence, and digital utilities depend on large volumes of electricity, continuously, predictably, and reliably.
Large-scale artificial intelligence models already consume energy equivalent to that of medium-sized cities. The limit of digital transformation is not just technological. It's energetic.
In this context, the global dispute between the United States, China, and other powers should be interpreted as a dispute over organized energy capacity.
Whoever can offer abundant, cheap, and sovereign electricity becomes the natural territory of the advanced digital economy. Whoever cannot is restricted to the role of technology consumer, importing solutions, processed data, and strategic decisions.
Electromobility clearly illustrates this structural change. Electric vehicles are not just more efficient or less polluting means of transportation.
They represent the convergence between the electricity sector, the battery industry, data systems, and the urban economy. Each electric vehicle is simultaneously a mobility asset, a mobile energy storage unit, and a data generation platform.
Treating electromobility solely as a replacement for combustion engines is a strategic error. The real debate involves mastering battery production chains, charging infrastructure, energy management systems, integration with smart grids, and controlling the data generated by mobility.
Without this control, fleet electrification can create new external dependencies. With it, it becomes an instrument for reindustrialization, logistical efficiency, reduction of urban costs, and technological sovereignty.
Energy storage occupies a central position in this new arrangement. There can be no consistent expansion of renewable sources without storage solutions that guarantee stability, flexibility, and security to the electrical system.
Nor can there be energy sovereignty without technological and industrial mastery of these solutions. Storage is the backbone of the energy transition.
Brazil faces a rare combination of strategic attributes: a predominantly clean electricity matrix, continental scale, a significant domestic market, consolidated leadership in biofuels, significant potential in critical minerals, and substantial oil reserves. This plurality should be viewed not as a contradiction to be resolved, but as a competitive advantage to be leveraged.
The recurring historical error is falling into the logic of mutually exclusive choices: oil versus renewables, electrification versus biofuels. No major power has carried out its energy transition by abruptly abandoning its existing sources. All have used present assets to finance the future, preserve social stability, and maintain investment capacity.
Exploring resources with advanced technology, environmental rigor, and national reinvestment is not a step backward; it's strategic realism.
Natural advantages, however, do not automatically translate into sovereignty. Without coordination between energy policy, industrial policy, technological innovation, and territorial development, the country risks continuing to export natural resources and importing high value-added strategic solutions.
Therefore, the energy transition in Brazil needs to be treated as a state policy. This implies long-term planning, regulatory predictability, strengthening of local production chains, consistent investment in electricity grids, storage and digitalization, as well as clear governance over strategic assets.
The energy transition is inevitable. Taking the lead, however, remains a choice. In the new energy landscape, sovereignty is neither rhetoric nor narrative. It is a material, everyday, and strategic construction.
* Guilherme Pereira is a lawyer, graduated from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), with a Master's degree in Law from the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais (PUC Minas). He works in the areas of Public Law, energy, infrastructure and mobility, focusing on energy sovereignty, regulatory framework and development strategy. He is a member of the National Association of Vehicle Rental Companies (ANAV) and Legal Director of the Union of Vehicle Rental Companies of Minas Gerais (SINDILOC-MG).
The opinions and information expressed are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position of the author. Canal Solar.
