Qualla: Tucuruí transmission line

Tucuruí transmission line: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bruno Huberman, Repórter do Futuro, CC BY 2.0. Two steel towers stand on either side of a channel of the Amazon at Jurupari island, 295 metres tall - within thirty metres of the Eiffel Tower - and each weighing 2,500 tonnes. Between them, bundles of aluminium cable cross 2,148 metres of open water without a single intermediate support. There is no road to either tower and no town in sight - nothing but forest and brown river. This is the middle of the Linhão de Tucuruí, the line that finally connected the Brazilian Amazon north of the river to the national electricity grid. For all the work elsewhere on the route - about 1,800 kilometres of double circuit, 3,600 towers, eight substations of which seven were built from nothing - the project came down to whether anyone could throw a wire across the Amazon.

Image: Bruno Huberman, Repórter do Futuro | CC BY 2.0

Tucuruí transmission line: The Unplugged North

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento, CC BY 2.0. Until the 2010s, Amapá, Roraima and large parts of Pará and Amazonas sat outside the Brazilian grid. They ran on thermal generation: diesel and gas, expensive, dirty and subsidised by everyone else. Manaus had the Balbina Dam nearby, a notoriously poor bargain that drowned a grea...

Image: Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento | CC BY 2.0

Tucuruí transmission line: Buffalo Trails and a Barge Pulled by a Digger

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Repórter do Futuro, CC BY 2.0. Building it meant crossing terrain that does not accommodate heavy machinery. The route was kept alongside existing highways wherever possible, and where the line had to cross standing forest, engineers raised unusually tall towers so the conductors could clear the canopy rather ...

Image: Repórter do Futuro | CC BY 2.0

Tucuruí transmission line: The Span

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Repórter do Futuro, CC BY 2.0. The river crossings - the Amazon, the Trombetas, the Uatumã - demanded a different order of structure. At Jurupari the line makes a 1.2-kilometre jump between 150-metre towers, then the big one: 2.2 kilometres between the 295-metre giants, the strain section running 3,908 metres ...

Image: Repórter do Futuro | CC BY 2.0

Tucuruí transmission line: The Line That Stopped Short

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SallesNeto BR, Public domain. Power reached Manaus in 2013, two years past target, at a total investment of US$2.29 billion. The northern extension, 750 kilometres on to Boa Vista, ran into something no engineering could solve. The chosen route follows the BR-174 highway, and 123 kilometres of it, carrying ab...

Image: SallesNeto BR | Public domain

Tucuruí transmission line: The Width of a Corridor

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Repórter do Futuro, CC BY 2.0. A transmission line in the Amazon is not only its towers. Beneath the conductors runs a maintenance corridor up to seventy metres wide, and for a great many forest animals seventy metres of open ground is a wall. In 2014 scientists at the National Institute for Amazonian Research...

Image: Repórter do Futuro | CC BY 2.0