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.
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