En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young says the of­fi­cial han­dover of elec­tric ve­hi­cle charg­ing sta­tions and so­lar LED light­ing at Queen’s Hall in Port-of-Spain will serve as an­oth­er means of en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy in T&T.

Young, who is al­so Act­ing Prime Min­is­ter, made the com­ments at the event, which took place on Fri­day night.

In ex­plain­ing what this meant on a larg­er scale, Young said, “What we are do­ing is try­ing to lead by ex­am­ple, so I am very proud of the LED lights and even hap­pi­er about those that are com­plete­ly so­lar-pow­ered. Those small changes have a knock-on ef­fect on our en­er­gy sec­tor and al­so on Trinidad and To­ba­go.

“It helps Queen’s Hall be­cause when you look at any in­sti­tu­tion look­ing to com­pete glob­al­ly, one of the things they need to look at now is en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy,” the min­is­ter ex­plained, adding that this al­so falls in­to the cat­e­go­ry of sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

He added that it al­so demon­strates that ef­forts to move to­wards re­new­ables have a knock-on ef­fect in terms of sav­ing on elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion.

“The domi­no ef­fect would al­so help us to utilise the nat­ur­al gas we would use nor­mal­ly to pro­duce elec­tric­i­ty,” Young added. He said those mol­e­cules of gas can in­stead be sold. Young ex­plained that those were those par­tic­u­lar poli­cies that he has been try­ing to push over the last few years.

“The more we can move off from us­ing our nat­ur­al gas for pow­er gen­er­a­tion is the more we can turn those mol­e­cules for rev­enue gen­er­a­tion,” Young re­it­er­at­ed.

Mean­while, Joseph Ish­mael Khan, chair­man of NGC who al­so spoke, agreed that this was a sig­nif­i­cant step in the coun­try’s en­er­gy fu­ture, not­ing that three elec­tric charg­ing sta­tions were of­fi­cial­ly hand­ed over along with 11 LED and 29 LED so­lar-pow­ered car park perime­ter lights at Queen’s Hall.

Garfield George, gen­er­al man­ag­er of Queen’s Hall, al­so ex­pressed his grat­i­tude, say­ing, “This part­ner­ship has po­si­tioned Queen’s Hall as an ac­tive par­tic­i­pant in en­vi­ron­men­tal com­mit­ment. We are proud to demon­strate how cul­tur­al in­sti­tu­tions can em­brace en­vi­ron­men­tal re­spon­si­bil­i­ty.”

The in­stal­la­tions at Queen’s Hall com­ple­ment oth­er projects led by Na­tion­al En­er­gy, such as the EV charg­ing sta­tions at Preysal and the col­lab­o­ra­tion on so­lar-pow­ered EV charg­ers at The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, St Au­gus­tine. To­geth­er, they stat­ed, these ini­tia­tives un­der­score Na­tion­al En­er­gy’s com­mit­ment to ad­vanc­ing a low-car­bon fu­ture for this coun­try.