What can Brazil’s electricity market teach us about building clean and reliable energy systems? This lecture tells the story of how Brazil shifted from the 2001 energy crisis to a new model based on long-term forward contracts that successfully drove renewable expansion. It explores how these contracts reduce uncertainty, shape investment incentives, and foster renewables through optimal portfolios of complementary solar, wind, and hydro resources. The talk also addresses emerging challenges with excess of subsidies for intermittent renewables and considers lessons that Brazil, the U.S., and other Latin American countries can share as they design the next generation of electricity markets.

Alexandre Street holds an M.Sc. and a D.Sc. (Ph.D.) in Electrical Engineering with an emphasis in Operations Research from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. He is an Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at PUC-Rio, where he also teaches in the Industrial Engineering Department. He currently holds the position of Edward Larocque Tinker Visiting Professor at Stanford University’s Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) and is a visiting researcher at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD). At PUC-Rio, he founded the R&D Laboratory of Applied Mathematical Programming and Statistics (LAMPS), the Renewable Storage and Flexibility Research Group for Power Systems Sustainability, and Lamps Co, an energy-tech startup incubated at the university. His work bridges academia, industry, and policy, promoting applied research that connects students with real-world challenges faced by regulators, generators, and large consumers in the energy sector. Professor Street has played a pivotal role in shaping Latin American electricity markets, particularly in the development and implementation of long-term forward contract auctions, which are now a cornerstone of Brazil’s 2004 market reform and a model referenced across the region. He has also contributed to major institutional and regulatory modernization efforts, supporting governmental entities in defining new guidelines for managing data, computational models, and software used in price formation and resource planning, topics that constitute much of his research work. Professor Street is a Senior Member of IEEE and served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, IEEE Open Access Journal of Power and Energy, and IEEE Transactions on Energy Markets, Policy, and Regulation. He is also a member of the Brazilian Power System Planner Advisory Council, contributing to discussions that shape long-term planning and regulatory strategies. His research spans robust and stochastic optimization, power system economics, planning and operation.