Due to the large ethanol production in Brazil, it became a much-used automotive fuel, with this history beginning in the 1970s. It was a natural path that this fuel was considered for other types of engines, including those applied to power generation. Thus, the studies about the use of ethanol in gas turbine engines started in the early years of the 1970s. The results showed in 1976 with a 625 kVA turbo generator, Paraná II. The engine was made of a Garrett IE-831-800 coupled to a Toshiba electricity generator. The set was expected to be installed as a combined cycle in a cassava ethanol production plant in Caucaia, Ceará State. The high costs of ethanol from cassava led to the abortion of the project. Two other initiatives were started in 1977 and 1979, using different gas turbine engines and variations of ethanol. The last experiment happened at the Juiz de Fora Thermal Power Plant, in the mid-2000s, in a work reported by Machado, 2010. Since the decade of the 1970s, ethanol production technology has changed and evolved. Costs are now lower than they were. The same happened to the gas turbine technology, performance and costs.
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