Wartsila believes flexibility is key to ethanol power generation in Brazil

Wartsila, a Finnish company, is betting on a more flexible way to generate electricity with ethanol in Brazil. Similar efforts by large firms failed a decade earlier.

Wartsila announced in March a partnership with a power station in Recife in northeast Brazil, where a 4-megawatt engine would burn ethanol during a 2-year pilot program starting in April 2026.

The Finnish company touted its efforts as the first ever world trial of generating electricity using an ethanol powered engine. According to those who worked on the projects, similar experiments carried out by Brazilian corporate giants Petrobras or Vale failed due to high costs and low take-up.

Brazil is the second largest producer of ethanol in the world, behind the United States. The biofuel is produced primarily from sugarcane, but also increasingly from corn. Brazil has been using ethanol as a fuel for cars since decades. This has led to volatile prices that are affected by the sugar and petroleum markets.

In 2010, Petrobras and General Electric, just before General Electric split into three public companies in the United States, teamed up to convert a gas-turbine at the power plant of the state-run oil company, Juiz De Fora, to run on bioethanol.

A person familiar with the project said, under condition of anonymity: "Ethanol is very exciting. Everyone gets hyped up about it." After the 1,000-hour trial, the plant switched back to natural gas, because the higher cost of ethanol made it unsustainable as a fuel.

Petrobras has confirmed that the turbine at Juiz de Fora is now powered by natural gas.

James Pessoa, former chief executive of VSE, said that the company invested $600 million into clean energy. This included ethanol-powered electric power.

Pessoa stated that VSE had built smaller generators based on ethanol for electricity, which were used by Rio de Janeiro, Amazonas State, and Brazil's Antarctic Research Station.

VSE closed its doors in 2013. Pessoa stated that ethanol-powered engines like the ones produced by VSE have not been further developed since 2013.

He said that the technology existed and that Brazil could power itself with millions of heavy engines powered by ethanol. "But practically, there is zero"

Wartsila will test ethanol for one of its 32M engine, which is bigger than the VSE generators, but smaller than the Petrobras plant, in order to achieve efficiency on a larger scale.

In an interview, Jorge Alcaide said that while running a turbine powered by ethanol 24/7 is more expensive than natural gas it cannot provide the flexibility required by a grid such as Brazil's which is mainly powered by renewables.

Alcaide said that the engine would "follow" the wind and restart quickly when renewable resources like wind and solar fail.

Wartsila has declined to disclose its expenditure on the pilot.

He said that thermal power plants in Brazil could be used as a standby. "We must have thermal power available. It's like an insurance policy."

(source: Reuters)