In August, according to the power sector watchdog Aneel, Brazil connected twenty new facilities to its grid: fifteen solar plants, three thermal plants, two wind parks. The month added 1.68 gigawatts. The year so far has added 4.85 GW, of which solar accounts for 3.5 GW. The country now holds 221 GW of installed generation capacity, almost 85 per cent of it renewable, and by 2025 roughly half of its total energy mix came from renewable sources — solar, wind, bioenergy. Its energy-related emissions made up less than 20 per cent of national greenhouse gas emissions in 2023, against a global average of about 75 per cent.
This is the official story, and it happens to be true. It is also, as these things go in Brasília, less than the whole story. Brazil has been expanding its oil and gas production at the same time, to strengthen energy security, as the phrase goes, and to consolidate itself as a regional energy hub. The green grid and the crude are not rivals here. They are partners in the same portfolio.
The money keeps arriving. In May the World Bank’s board approved a project for low-carbon industrial commodities, clean fuels and enabling infrastructure in the Northeast — one of the country’s poorest regions — with a $500 million loan inside a broader $968 million financing package. The New Development Bank financed the 648-megawatt Serra da Palmeira Wind Complex in Paraíba state, completed in October 2025 by CTG, the Brazilian arm of China Three Gorges. And China’s State Grid Corporation recently broke ground on a 1,468-kilometre ultra-high-voltage transmission line, the largest investment in an electricity transmission franchise in Brazilian history. The two governments name their shared priorities without embarrassment: green development, energy transition, re-industrialisation.
In October, Brazil votes. The frontrunners are President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the leftist incumbent, and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, of the right. Business has already made its request. The Brazilian Business Council for Sustainable Development, CEBDS, which represents eleven of the country’s largest business groups, published a 2026 Letter to Presidential Candidates calling for focus, strategy and governance. At its Sustainable Congress the group took up geopolitics and climate, investment amid uncertainty, water, power, food — and how to make an economic advantage of the sustainability agenda itself.
This nature is our greatest economic infrastructure, and the world is willing to pay for it. But no competitive advantage can sustain itself: it requires planning, policies that span governments, and a productive sector willing to turn natural wealth into lasting prosperity.
Marina Grossi, the CEBDS president and a business-sector envoy to COP30 — the climate conference Brazil hosted in Belém last November — put it more plainly. “In this letter, we are trying to propose a project for the country,” she said. “Something that will help us move forward rather than reduce us to selling commodities alone, but also climate solutions.”
Neither candidate needs much persuading, which is its own kind of story. Bolsonaro favours oil and gas expansion and wants larger energy subsidies; he is described as a climate denier, and yet he recognises the breadth of support for green energy and is not excluding it from his agenda. Lula, for his part, instructed his ministries in December to prepare an energy-transition resolution within 60 days for the National Council for Energy Policy, following COP30 — a plan to reduce dependence on oil, coal and gas, financed in part by an Energy Transition Fund drawing its revenue from the oil and gas sector. He also supports oil and gas as part of the mix. In recent weeks he has vowed to protect Brazil’s oil and critical minerals from foreign control.
Read those two paragraphs again. The climate denier will not touch the wind farms. The transition president will fund the transition out of petroleum and guard the petroleum from foreigners. The wind complex in Paraíba is Chinese-built; the transmission line is Chinese-financed; the letter from business asks only that the planning outlast the governments.
The expectation, inside Brazil and out, is that the build-out continues — the solar, the wind, the thermal, the crude — regardless of who wins in October. Twenty new facilities went onto the grid in August. No one in the race proposes that September’s number be smaller.