Azevedo, Francisco Fransualdo deAraújo, Marcos Antônio Alves de2020-04-152020-04-152019-12-05ARAÚJO, Marcos Antônio Alves de. Território, técnica e eletrificação: as novas configurações do circuito espacial de produção de energia elétrica no estado do Rio Grande do Norte, Nordeste do Brasil. 2019. 636f. Tese (Doutorado em Geografia) - Centro de Ciências Humanas, Letras e Artes, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, 2019.https://repositorio.ufrn.br/jspui/handle/123456789/28777The current expansion of the informational-scientific-technical environment has generated a crescent demand for mega-scale electric energy production, especially from unconventional renewable sources such as wind, solar and biomass energy. The search for new sources occurs since the 1970 decade, due to the international energetic geopolitics reorganization triggered by the following reasons: 1) the oil shocks and its negative impacts on the economies of importing countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); 2) private and public investments to the discovery and advancement of new electric energy transmission and generation technologies; 3) socio-environmental risks involving the use of some traditional sources like thermonuclear energy; 4) the emergence of environmental questions and its transformation in market business. In this sense, new regions have been specializing in energy production by using renewable energetic potential available in their environment and became important niches of surplus-value extraction. In Brazil, a country that has its energy matrix predominantly based in the hydraulic source, the execution of electric energy generation projects based on the use of wind energy has made the subspaces of its national territory, historically demanding for electricity, to also become providers like the case of the Rio Grande do Norte state. In recent years, the abundant wind potential available in the aforementioned state has attracted international and national investors, resulting in an increase of its installed electric capacity from 17 MW in 2003 to 4.491 MW in 2018, of which 85,8% are produced by the wind source. This capacity, when converted to generation, reversed the historical position of this state in the Northeastern subsystem of the Brazilian National Interconnected System (SIN), going from importer-consumer to producer-consumer-exporter. Currently, the state is self-sufficient in electric energy, exporting (on average) 64,3% of its produced surplus of which 58,9% are wind energy. In this new setting context, the state’s electric material base was amplified and renovated via the installation of new generating units, substations, transmission lines, among other items. Furthermore, the studies of Energy Geography performed by Max Sorre (1948; 1967), Pierre George (1952) and Gerald Manners (1964), inspired the objective of this study, which is to comprehend the new settings of electric energy production in the state of Rio Grande do Norte by the corporate use of its territory for the wind energy subcircuit. Consequently, the spatial circuit of production theory, based on the Marxian intellectual tradition and on the thinking of geographer Milton Santos. The obtained results conducted the ratification of the thesis that the wind energy subcircuit implementation in Rio Grande do Norte has occurred from the productive, normative and technical expansion of the national electric macrosystem in the state, and of its oligopolization, foreignization and financialization, resulted from the merger and concentration of capital and the electric sector denationalization via processes of company and domestic assets acquisition by big international economic groups which majorly controls the generation, distribution and commercialization segments of energy. Those groups are also taking control of the transmission segment. Finally, the conclusion is that a process of expansion of national spaces in the international economy, once observed by professor Milton Santos in Brazil, is now happening in the geographical environment of Rio Grande do Norte through electric energy.Acesso AbertoTerritórioTécnicaEnergia elétricaEnergias renováveisEnergia eólicadoctoralThesisCNPQ::CIENCIAS HUMANAS::GEOGRAFIA