Imagine a neighborhood avenue where a large street market takes place every weekend. Each vendor does their part: improving their stall, paying close attention to cleanliness, training their staff, running promotions, creating combo deals, and expanding their product range.
The street fills up. Sales happen. And, little by little, many begin to think that the fair "sustains itself," simply through the individual effort of selling more.
Then one day a notice arrives from the city hall: the permit is going to change. New requirements, new fees, new operating rules — some reasonable, others debatable, but all with an immediate effect: without predictability, the fair becomes a risk.
And that's where the lesson that the market often forgets comes in: a good trade fair doesn't survive on marketing and the desire to sell alone; a good trade fair needs a stable institutional environment.
The solar sector experienced something similar in 2025. It was a conflict-ridden year, marked by regulatory and legislative pressure, in which the discussion ceased to be purely technological and became explicitly political and institutional.
And 2026 is likely to be even more demanding, because the market is entering with mixed signals: on the one hand, projections point to a slowdown in the overall expansion of solar power; on the other hand, there are expectations of growth in distributed generation — but conditioned on a more predictable and functional environment.
At this point, it's worth returning to the metaphor: it's no use having the best stall at the market if the avenue loses its permit — or starts operating under uncertainty.
The macro level (rules, rituals, governance, legal security, and cost of capital) is the foundation upon which the micro level (sales, events, training, marketing) stands. When the macro level deteriorates, the micro level becomes mere froth: much effort, much energy, little sustainable conversion.
The most instructive episode of 2025 was the processing of Provisional Measure 1.304. In initial versions of the debate, an additional charge associated with compensated energy in distributed generation was discussed — a design that, in practice, would have repriced investments and created insecurity in the market.
On the decisive day, the Chamber overturned the provision by a large majority (233 to 148), and the text proceeded without this charge. Regardless of the political interpretations of the episode, the lesson is clear: the sector's "permit" can be rewritten quickly — and it is institutional presence that prevents the avenue from closing.
This is where a maturity agenda for 2026 comes in: the sector needs to treat Brasília as part of the business. Not "politics" in a pejorative sense; it's public policy, with its rituals, arenas, opportunity costs, and need for coordination.
A concrete example of institutional reach is FREPEL (the Mixed Parliamentary Front for Clean Energy), coordinated by federal deputy Lafayette de Andrada (Republicanos-MG). According to the Chamber of Deputies' website, FREPEL currently has 189 signatory deputies and 9 listed senators.
And here a pedagogical note is in order: since the establishment of FREPEL, there has been an institutional arrangement whereby INEL (National Institute of Clean Energy) acts as a structuring technical partner of the Front, also being, in practice, the one that sustains the budgetary effort necessary to enable studies, events and the production of qualified subsidies throughout the year — a permanent cost that rarely finds sharing in the sector.
Other initiatives, such as the Free Solar Movement (MSL), play a relevant role in mobilization and representation with broad reach and a focus on distributed microgeneration, while remaining more distant from other issues such as storage and curtailment, which require interaction.
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