EN 
PT_BR 
The Minister of Mines and Energy, Bento Albuquerque, stated, in a press conference, that Brazil will give discounts on the electricity bills of residential consumers who save electricity from September 1st.
The expectation is that Pasta will release more details about how the measure works at the beginning of next week. The proposal, which is part of the Federal Government's voluntary reduction program, aims to reduce energy demand and avoid the risk of blackouts.
The country is currently experiencing the biggest water crisis in the last 91 years, due to the historic drought that affects the main reservoirs in the Southeast and Central-West regions. Together, the two locations account for more than 70% of national hydropower generation.
Without water in the reservoirs, the Federal Government had to take measures to avoid the need for rationing, such as purchasing energy from neighboring countries and activating thermal plants, which in addition to causing more pollutants, also made the electricity bill of Brazilian families more expensive. . The value will be even higher in 2022.
Read too: Electricity bills have already had three consecutive increases in 2021
Albuquerque also revealed that the prospects for rain until October are not encouraging. “The prospects for the future that we have so far, in terms of precipitation until the end of the dry period, are not good and the prospect of lower precipitation remains”, he stated.
The Ministry has been warning about the problem of shortages for at least three months. At the end of July, the minister spoke on national radio and television asking the population to make conscious use of water and electricity.
The minister also highlighted that the government monitors the electricity sector 24 hours a day and that, this week, extraordinary meetings were held with the CMSE (Electricity Sector Monitoring Committee) and the CREG (Chamber of Exceptional Rules for Hydroenergy Management).
“We identified that the months of July and August were the worst months in the historical series of monitoring of our electricity sector (…) This obviously has consequences for the entire management of our system”, he said.
Public agencies
This Wednesday (25), the MME also issued a decree to reduce energy consumption in public buildings between September 1st of this year and April 1st, 2022.
According to the document, the forecast is for a drop in energy consumption in public administration from 10% to 20% in relation to the average consumed in the same period between 2018 and 2019.
To carry out the control, it was agreed that the bodies and entities will publish consumption on the Internet so that the comparison with the established period can be monitored by consumers.
Industries
Another sector that also gained rules to reduce the use of energy demand were free market industries – those that buy energy directly from the generator or supplier, without going through the distributor.
The idea is to remunerate, through a system similar to auctions, the energy that companies manage to save, until April 30, 2022, shifting this consumption to a time that puts less pressure on the SIN (National Interconnected System) .
The published changes also provide that the minimum value to be offered for reduction is 5 MW and that consumers can organize themselves and act as aggregators, reducing transaction costs.
In the coming days, the ONS (National Electric System Operator) and the CCEE (Electric Energy Trading Chamber) will publish the guidelines and documents so that companies can participate in the voluntary offer to reduce energy demand.
