Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement partners with China to use solar energy in cooperatives

Brasil de Fato

João Pedro Stedile, leader of the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST, in Portuguese), was in China to talk with institutions and companies that have already started partnerships involving the movement’s settlements.

The MST is also looking for a solution to an energy problem Brazilian rural cooperatives, including the MST, face. The movement has 185 cooperatives and 1,900 associations, which run 120 small and medium-sized agro-industries.

The main production chains in MST settlements are rice, milk, meat, coffee, cocoa, seeds, cassava, sugar cane and grains, according to the movement.

The problem is that the agro-industries need steam and hot water to pasteurize food. “Today, unfortunately, the pasteurization process is done in wood-fired boilers,” he explained in an interview with Brasil de Fato. “There are also electric boilers, but they are very expensive, especially after the privatization of hydroelectric plants [in Brazil], including Eletrobras [a Brazilian-based hydroelectric plant, the largest in Latin America],” Stedile laments.

Concentrated Solar Power

Also known as heliothermal technology, concentrated solar power (CSP) consists of a system that uses mirrors or lenses to concentrate sunlight on a receiver where a liquid is heated and then turns a turbine or powers a motor to generate electricity.

There are at least four main types of these systems: fresnel, tower, parabolic dish and parabolic trough.

In fresnel technology, the mirrors, whose position is adjustable, reflect the sun’s rays towards the absorber tube, and the transfer fluid carries away the heat. This is the type of system Beijing Zhaoyang Solar Thermal Technology developed, with whose representatives the MST delegation met.

The deputy director of Beijing Zhaoyang (also called Tera Solar), Ruan Yang, says more and more Chinese companies aim to transition to clean energy “through technological reform and innovation”.

“More than a decade ago, we realized we had to reduce costs and change the energy structure without increasing consumers’ costs,” says Yang.

Since its inception in 2010, the Chinese company has registered 43 patents for innovations in its system. One of them is the automatic mirror cleaner, powered by energy generated by photovoltaic panels.

“It’s a very interesting technology that can be used in Brazil,” says Stedile. He says the next step is to draw up an information exchange program “to see what scales are feasible in Brazil and what the costs are”.

For his part, Yang hopes China and Brazil may work together in this sector, since “they are huge agricultural producing countries and we share some problems and needs.”

Stedile says that, under socialism with Chinese characteristics, “their logic is always to solve a social and economic problem [at the same time].” “It’s another way of thinking, because this technology is also available in Spain, Sweden and Germany. However, when you talk to these countries, it’s always ‘How much will I earn?’, ‘How much will I exploit you?’.” On the other hand, on the Chinese side, he says, an economic project is only viable and will only succeed if all the parties involved win.

The political synergy between the governments of Xi Jinping and Lula could facilitate technological transfer between the two countries, a necessity for Brazil, according to the MST leader, since “We are victims of neoliberalism that deindustrialized the country and made us more dependent on agricultural and mineral commodities.” With the Lula government, there is a strategic project to re-industrialize the country, but we are lagging behind, he concludes.