Slum Electrification Pilot in Brazil

Recognizing the very large, growing number of slum residents lacking legal, safety and affordable access to electricity in developing countries, the International Copper Association (ICA), in cooperation with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), launched the Slum Electrification and Loss Reduction Program (SELR) in October 2005. One of the selected cities was São Paulo in Brazil, in which was identified Paraisópolis, a slum area in the middle of the city, to develop a pilot project in partnership with AES Eletropaulo, local utility; Nexans, cable manufacturer and Itaipu, transformer manufacturer.

Paraisópolis is the largest slum in São Paulo and, like most other slums, it is an informal community which lacks most municipal services and is home to families that migrated from rural areas over the years. Located in a large ravine, Paraisópolis has a physically challenging geography and is surrounded by middle- and upper-income residential areas.

The pilot targets two neighborhoods having approximately 4,000 households and businesses, all of which are illegal customers of the local utility. As these households and businesses do not pay for service, they do not efficiently manage their electricity consumption, and many appliances are old and poorly maintained. Consequently, electricity consumption is very high (around 325 kWh per household).

The main objective of the pilot is to develop and test alternative approaches for providing legal and affordable electricity services to São Paulo’s urban poor and to document and disseminate the lessons learned for use in SEE program in order to increase the copper consumption. Specifically, the pilot aims to:

• Test and evaluate the relative cost-effectiveness of new technical approaches to preventing theft (e.g., the use of coaxial copper cables to substitute aluminum aerial bundle cables and remote metering) and improving the efficiency of the network (e.g., with high-efficiency transformers);
• Improve the affordability of electricity service for low income consumers through efficiency improvements in homes and businesses (e.g., rewiring of homes to code to improve safety, energy efficient refrigerators, efficiency lighting) ; and
• Assess the economic, financial, and social impacts of the pilot.

Before Regularization

After Regularization

Develop and demonstrate a sustainable, affordable and widely-replicable approach to legal electricity service provision in slums will permit to make a business case to disseminate the improvements in safety and energy efficiency across Brazil’s electric utilities and beyond in Latin America.

Related:

USAID Background report