The Wrong Variable
Some time ago I brought here the variables that lock up energy investment in Brazil: interest rates, the exchange rate, module prices, import tax, the Fio B grid fee, the tariff. The numbers. Today I return to the same subject without bringing a single new one, because the energy investor's problem in this country was never a lack of data. It was reading the wrong data.
Whoever waits for the scenario to clear before investing is reading the wrong variable. Interest and the exchange rate will never settle; oscillating is their nature, and waiting for them to stop is waiting for something that never comes. Meanwhile, the variable that actually weighs is already written: the Fio B grid fee already jumped to 60% in 2026 and reaches 90% in 2028. That is not uncertainty, it is a decision already made against the investor, with a date set. The amateur freezes on what oscillates. The operator acts on what is already locked.
I moved into energy on purpose, after more than two decades operating another sector. Today I own three plants in operation and I am already analyzing new acquisitions. The first thing this market teaches is the scale of time. A power plant is not a bet on a cycle, it is an asset of 25, 30 years. To look at an asset like that through the lens of this quarter's interest rate is to bring the wrong clock to the table.
Because energy is not just any asset. It is the asset the world is at war over, today, openly. Whoever controls generation controls what no country can outsource. That force does not fit in a payback spreadsheet, and it is exactly what sustains the thesis: the long-term value of an asset the entire planet disputes is not measured by the cost of capital of a single year.
The investor who understands this changes the ruler. He extends the project, accepts a leaner return at the start, and goes after the gain further ahead, where it actually lives. The math almost no one does: energy inflation in Brazil runs in the range of 8% to 10% a year. Capitalize that over 25 years and look at what is left. The return is not in the first cycle, it is in the whole curve, and the curve belongs to energy, not to the mood of the market.
Every serious strategist in Brazil knows the problem: the Brazilian is immediatist. He does not play the long game, because he distrusts everything, the change of government, the change of law, the usual. The distrust is real, but it is noise, and noise does not enter the calculation of a thirty-year asset. Take the noise off the table, and the real return remains. The Brazilian habit of only believing in the last-minute result is not prudence, it is surrender dressed up as caution.
Whoever quit this game forgot that the match does not end when the scoreboard tightens. It ends when the whistle blows. And that whistle, in energy, still has twenty years to sound. Whoever decides now will be on the field when it blows. The rest will be in the stands, explaining why they waited.