The objective of this work is to evaluate the technical- economic potential of electric energy self-generation in Brazil. A deterministic methodology will be built for market evaluation. It will be based on a developed model for high voltage customers from LIGHT, located in state of Rio de Janeiro and extrapolated to establish the national market. The extrapolation will be made through the national consumption data. The distributed generation is analyzed from the state of the art of reciprocating internal combustion engines, Diesel and Otto cycles. These engines have widespread technology, high efficiency and offer low acquisition cost when compared with other small and medium scale gensets technologies. In that way, they were chosen, to be the alternatives for the distributed generation. The reciprocating engines have great potential to support the expansion of the distributed generation in Brazil. Diesel oil and natural gas are considered as the fuel alternatives for the gensets. Besides the usual diesel oil, used as fuel for diesel engines, it was considered the mix between diesel oil and natural gas. The mix is handled with an auxiliary conversion kit. It allows diesel oil being substituted around 80% by natural gas. It was only considered natural gas fuel for the gas engines. The economic feasibility of the investment in distributed generation is achieved when a comparison is made between the current cost of the electric energy, which is supplied by the local utility company, and the cost of acquisition and operation of the self generation system. The feasibility will be given by a strict economic aspect. Considering the attractiveness for the enterprise, it is given by a minimum internal rate of return of 15 percent per year in a horizon of 15 years. It is estimated that the national distributed generation can represent 2.6 percent of all national electric generation or 7,173 GWh/year. Mainly for generation at peak hours. The diesel oil gensets represents 44.6 percent of that total, the diesel-gas gensets 55.2 percent and the gas gensets around 0.2 percent. Meaning a daily consumption of 2.2 MMm3 of natural gas and 2,800 m3 of oil diesel. Self generation isn`t economic feasible at off-peak hours, because the low tariff value. For the perspective of expansion of the natural gas net distribution in Brazil, a sensibility analysis was accomplished between the natural gas cost and increase of the national distributed generation market. It is concluded that if the natural gas cost less, the national distributed generation market would grow, based mainly in diesel-gas and gas gensets. Finally, the impacts and benefits brought by distributed generation in the current scenery of national generation and transmission systems were analyzed.