As UHES Peixe Angical e São Salvador e o desenvolvimento socioeconômico dos municípios de Paranã, Peixe e São Salvador do Tocantins: prognóstico x realidade

Abstract

Brazil's energy matrix has a significant share of hydroelectric power plants, which are responsible for approximately 64% of the electricity generated in the country. These projects are honored by the national policy of the sector for ensuring lower production costs and environmental impact compared to other sources of electricity generation, in addition to contribute to regional and local development. Studies of technical viability highlight the aforementioned advantages, to the point of drawing positive scenarios of the influence of hydroelectric power plant projects in municipalities and regions, pointing out benefits such as job creation, boosting the local economy in the private sector and municipal returns, as well as improving infr astructure, services and public facilities at the local level. This is what happened in the state of Tocantins, where the construction of hydroelectric power plants, from 1998 and intensified in the 2000s, represented a development project aimed, besides contributing to the supply of energy to the National Interconnected System, it would also reverse underdevelopment lived for centuries by municipalities and communities. Four hydroelectric power plant undertakings were built along the Tocantins River from 1998 to 2012, all of them in the state of Tocantins, Brazil, affecting several municipalities. In this work, it was evaluated the socioeconomic performance of three municipalities of Tocantins from 2006 to 2016, which are Paranã, Peixe and São Salvador do Tocantins, impacted by the hydropower plant of Peixe Angical and São Salvador, in order to verify if the implementation of the projects contributed, with the socioeconomic development, resulting in improvements in the living conditions of the communities and regions touched by their construction, as recommended by the Integrated Environmental Assessment of the Tocantins River Basin, which predicted an accelerated pace of development of the localities in the medium term (until 2015) due to the hydroelectric power plants. The methodology of this research consists in document analysis, content analysis and in-depth interviews. The results indicate that there was an increase of income in the three municipalities. Nevertheless, the socioeconomic indicators revealed catalogs of economic and social development divergent from the predictions considered in the basin planning study and the speeches of political and business groups.