Sérgio de Salvo Brito
By: Deraldo Marins Cortez
General Energy Systems Coordinator of DNDE
The assignment of the name of “Sérgio de Salvo Brito” to the Reference Center of Solar and Wind Energy established on CEPEL, honors, with due justice, the brilliant professional, the solicitous colleague and upstanding citizen, whose untimely death is still lamented by all those who had the opportunity to spend time with him socially or professionally.
For the Center, choosing such patron could not be more appropriate.
An engineer, with graduate studies in nuclear energy, Sergio Brito embraced with a lot of enthusiasm the cause of renewable energy and soon became one of the most internationally known and respected Brazilians in this field.
As the Secretary of Technology of the Ministry of Mines and Energy during Sarney's government, then as the Technical Coordinator of the works for the National Energy Matrix Review, and finally as the first Officer of the National Energy Development Department, the Ministry of Infrastructure (current Department of Energy - MME), Sergio Brito devoted many efforts so as to bring into consideration the solar, wind and biomass energy as an important energy vector for the socio-economic and environmental development of the Country.
Ideologically firm, fearless, and above all unusually elegant and persevering, Sérgio Brito always started his preaching in favor of renewable energies, recognizing the importance of the organization of conventional energy systems for the Brazilian development, and claimed that renewable resources should be respected due to their potential for competitive participation in our energy matrix.
Back from the last trip he made to Europe, where among other professional activities he visited the Department of Energy of the European Community, Sérgio Brito went on to defend the thesis that solar and wind energy would already be competitive for specific applications in Brazil, especially in locations not served by conventional systems due to geographical barriers or limitations of economic nature.
From that point on, his speeches on the subject began to incorporate a novelty, which was the idea of creating a nucleus for the centralization and dissemination of information on renewable technologies, to organize the records of developed pilot projects, their successes and causes of eventual failures.
The premature death of Sergio Brito did not bury his dream and just a few months thereafter, CEPEL started the Agreement with NREL, whose serious and well-structured development broke new ground, with effective feasibility, for the regular use of renewable energy in Brazil.