Sao Paulo's Energy Secretary Visit

Today we visited the Secretary of Energy of the state of Sao Paulo. When we arrived we were ushered into a big room in which we met the secretary and co-secretary of energy for the state of Sao Paulo. He warmly welcomed us to their offices and told us about their plans for the presentation. He soon left to attend other more important meetings. Once he left, the co-secretary took over the show. Upon taking over, he discussed everything with us from the state's goals to their actions. The state's goals include energy security, evolutionary chain competitiveness, and reduction of emissions. The actions of the state include the growth of renewable energy. The leaders helped us understand what the current energy situation is in the world, Brazil, and Sao Paulo. Including the face that 81% of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels, 14% comes from renewable energy including biomass, hydro, and other, while 4.9% of energy comes from nuclear energy. In Brazil the energy allocation is 57% fossil fuels, 41% renewable energy, and 1.3% nuclear energy. One of the things I had never thought about was the fact that Brazil does not obtain all of the energy that it needs from its own sources. It obtains roughly about 30% of the energy that it consumes from the sources within the country and thus it must obtain the rest of its energy from imports. This is where such areas such as international relations come into play. It helped me realize the interconnectedness qualities of energy and international relations, which I had never deeply considered before this dialogue and before our trip. Although yesterday's class about alternative energy policy did help give a little bit of an introduction to this topic.
One of the subjects we covered were energy incentives. These were government sponsored programs which gave the public incentives to invest in alternative energies for themselves and their businesses. I had known before this dialogue about these sorts of programs existing in the United States, such as the solar panel industry and that if you make more power than you need from solar panels then you can sell the electricity to the grid for a small income. However, the ideas the co-secretary and his associates were stating were much larger scale incentives which made the presentation and the energy department's ideas rather interesting to listen to.
After all of the information was presented to us we were allowed to ask questions. Multiple very interesting and intelligent questions were asked at the end of the meeting and then the secretary left his important meeting just to see us off and to take a picture with us. All-in-all it was an informative trip.