Financial Times
In João Camara, a remote area in Brazil’s north-east, the car in which I am a passenger drives beneath a great row of wind turbines in João Camara, halting at one of the looming towers that make up this wind farm.
João Aysllan de Souza Ramos, maintenance and operations supervisor with Atlantic Energias Renováveis, jumps out of the driver’s seat and beckons me over to a flight of stairs that leads to the bottom level of the tower.
We climb up to take a look, but no further — visitors like me are not permitted to take the elevator up to the turbine above. I catch sight of a mechanic; his colleague is at work higher up in the tower. The turbine itself, in its casing, is the size of a small apartment.
As Ramos and I stand directly underneath the turbine, there is only the eerie whooshing sound of the 59m-long rotor blades and the constant wind in this part of Brazil, the arid coastal hinterland of Rio Grande do Norte, about 80 kilometres from the state capital Natal.
“This is the energy of the future,” says Ramos. Atlantic operates two wind farms in the region, their combined total of 30 towers generating 60MW of power. The area has some of the best winds in the world for electricity generation, he says.
