A few months ago, I visited the largest coal-fired power plant in America, Plant Scherer. When Scherer operates at full capacity, it produces 3.5 gigawatts of power. A nuclear reactor produces around one gigawatt of power

Itaipu produces 14 gigawatts of power. In other words, it’s four times the size of America’s largest coal power plant… and 14 times the size of most nukes. Itaipu provides 93% of Paraguay’s power and 25% of Brazil’s power.

I can’t explain in words what a beast this dam is. It stretches four miles across and 65 stories high. The iron and steel used to build it would give you 380 Eiffel Towers. It’s one of the seven modern wonders of the world, alongside the Panama Canal and the Golden Gate Bridge.

According to their joint agreement, Paraguay gets 50% of the electricity from the dam. Brazil gets 50%. But Paraguay is a small country. It has a population of 6 million people… versus 200 million in Brazil. So Paraguay only keeps 5% of Itaipu’s power and sells the rest back to Brazil.

This makes Paraguay the largest exporter of hydroelectric power in the world.

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Here’s the thing: Paraguay sells its electricity to Brazil at $3 per kilowatt-hour. Right now, Brazil can sell the same unit of electricity to its private utilities at $150 per kilowatt-hour. There is an electricity crisis in Latin America right now, especially in Chile, and electricity prices are very high. It’s immediately obvious Brazil is not paying Paraguay the right price for its power. And Paraguay is losing billions of dollars.

Corrupt politicians set this low price in 1973… under a 50-year contract. The Brazilians bribed the Paraguayan government to sell them power at a rate that’s far too low. Now, there are calls to change this rate, but who knows if that’ll happen…

The thing is, Paraguay doesn’t have to sell its power to Brazil. It could consume the power itself. I think it would be a great business to set up an aluminum or zinc smelter here. These businesses are electricity-intensive. The problem is, Paraguay is a poor country and has absolutely no industry. It’s all agriculture here.

According to the people at Itaipu, the energy the dam creates every day is the equivalent to 433,000 barrels of oil. That’s about half of what Canada’s Athabasca oil sands produce each day. Except it’s renewable, it’s clean, and it takes no energy to produce.

This cheap electricity is one of the reasons I like Paraguay as an investment. But it’s hard to get your money into the country…

Paraguay has no stock market… only a small bond market. So to invest in Paraguay, you’ll have to go there yourself and buy assets from the locals. That’s a good thing. It means everything is cheap.

In Paraguay, for example, you can buy companies for book value… that pay 45% dividends, according to one broker I met. You can buy real estate with 10% rental yields. And cattle farms with 18.5% cash yields.

Good investing,

Tom

P.S. The Three Gorges Dam in China will be the largest hydroelectric dam in the world by volume. It will operate at full capacity by 2011. China hopes it’ll produce 18 gigawatts. That’s bigger than Itaipu.

Our tour guide wasn’t convinced Three Gorges would be able to produce that much power. “The Yangtze isn’t as powerful as the Parana,” he said. “We’ll see…”

P.P.S. There is talk of a hydro plant twice the size of Three Gorges in Africa, on the Congo River. But it’ll never happen. For a start, only 10% of Africans have access to the grid… What will they do with all that power? And secondly, it will require cooperation from seven different central African countries… and hundreds of billions of dollars in loans.

Source: The Largest Electricity Exporter