R & D IN BRAZIL, VOLUNTARY SERFDOM AND OTHER MATTERS
ILUMINA – Institution for Strategic Planning of
Brazilian Electric Sector
Sometime in the future one can be sure that honest historians of the brazilian electric sector will ask why things came the way they were produced in the minds of neo liberal politicians and technocrats a decade past, particularly in the last four years. People in the developed paradises simply was informed by the media that brazilians finally were coming to age. Investors and specialists faced joyfully an enourmous variety of seminars in the american and european cities about how to buy, complete or dismembered, a profitable brazilian utility. And, believe it or not, with the possibility of cheap money offered by the local federal development bank. Brazilians were even more kind to pay Cooppers & Lybrand for the production of such modernistic model.
The intention is to write a short article keeping our promise to the — editor, without diverging from the chosen context and subject, on the contrary, going to the historical roots of the whole drama. Dominant class (classes ?) and public officers in Brazil had – since our political independence in 1822 with brief periods when odd individuals tried making sovereignty prevail – a predominant characteristic: Voluntary Serfdom. Obviously, a collection of rationalizations were always attached. Cooppers & Lybrand was a good choise free from "ideologically biased" backward minded nationals !!
Another recent example of the syndrome is herein given with a short historical background. High and extra high voltage transmission systems in Brazil, like those in Canada, Russia and few other countries, have very long line network interconnecting mainly large hydro power plants to load centres. So far so obvious. But, in one of those brief periods mentioned above, from the sixties to the mid eighties, the fast system expansion challenge was answered by an enourmous and successful investment in education and training of professionals by the public power utilities and private brazilian consulting and engineering firms. A 60000 Mw installed capacity and a 70 000 km network of 138 to 750 kv-A.C. and +- 600 kv-D.C. was planned, studied, designed, built and commissioned from mid sixties to 1998. No conceptual confusion between autonomy and isolation must be made at this stage of the story. The strategy was of growing national technological and industrial competence with intense international dialog via all possible means. For the subscribers of – this story is not a new one as far it concerns hidropower and dam engineering in Brazil.
Suddenly things reversed. Voluntary Serfdom Syndrome, which was only dormant but alive in the minds of many awaiting in the dark corner, emerged. Globalization meant one way lane in international relations. Engineering jobs and wages declined sharply. Actually, the scenario restarted by easy stages since mid eighties. Private brazilian owned consulting and project firms simply vanished. Investment in autonomous R&D became a government non-priority. Even the managers, old career officers of sectorial public R&D laboratories (e.g: Eletrobrás/CEPEL), adhere to the new (old!?) wave heavily loaded with a blend of mediocrity, opportunism, lack of imagination and poor ethic in addition to the permanent syndrome .
But human beings do not evaporate so rapidly. The entusiastic brazilian power system engineers are aging, many prematurely jobless or retired or forced to retire. Most still in action, available in the privatized companies and in the not yet privatized and/or dismembered large federal ones.
By mid 1998 Eletrobras management decided, without no debate or analysis of merit by the federal regulatory agency (ANEEL), to sign a contract with National Grid Company to perform transmission system studies. A brazilian newspaper flatly and uncritically informed that the manager of NGC said that "his technical staff was ready to a fast landing in Brazil". NGC has 11000 km of high and extra high voltage transmission lines. All very short in lengh, heavily loaded.
The old CEGB R&D laboratories were closed after privatization. ILUMINA web site included an article where it is stated, foreseeing CEPEL crumbling, "that the fact was not so critical to UK. British society has no reason to complain about the country scientific, technological and engineering development in the last 300 years…" Brazil was only starting.
