Zahra Gor­don

There's a glob­al re­new­able en­er­gy rev­o­lu­tion tak­ing place, but T&T seems to be lag­ging be­hind, says man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Smart En­er­gy Ltd Ian Smart. Smart cit­ed Eu­ro­pean coun­tries such as Ger­many and Den­mark where re­new­able en­er­gy sources were be­com­ing the norm. In towns like Thist­ed, Den­mark, 98 per cent of all elec­tric­i­ty and 85 per cent of all heat­ing comes from re­new­able en­er­gy, in­clud­ing so­lar and wind pow­er.

Smart's com­pa­ny is one of about five lo­cal­ly-based re­new­able en­er­gy com­pa­nies that have opened for busi­ness in the past decade, in­clud­ing So­lar Gray Ltd, So­lar Pow­er Con­cepts Ltd and SM So­lar and Wind En­er­gy Sys­tems. This is with the ex­cep­tion of So­laris En­er­gy, a Bar­ba­di­an com­pa­ny with branch­es in Trinidad, Ja­maica and Grena­da, which has been in busi­ness for near­ly 20 years.

Smart told the T&T Guardian in a tele­phone in­ter­view last week there were many rea­sons why so­lar pow­er was slow on the up­take lo­cal­ly. "The up­front cost is still too high and not eco­nom­i­cal­ly achiev­able for the av­er­age per­son. And as an oil and gas-pro­duc­ing coun­try, our en­er­gy costs are ex­treme­ly low. So­lar pow­er is catch­ing on fur­ther up the is­lands be­cause their elec­tric­i­ty is five or six times more ex­pen­sive than ours."

A so­lar wa­ter heater can cost be­tween $7,500 and $13,000 for the av­er­age house­hold and this price de­pends on how many peo­ple need to be catered for. In a com­mer­cial build­ing the cost can dou­ble or triple de­pend­ing on the size. Smart said con­sumers should con­sid­er the long-term cost of con­tin­u­ing use of fos­sil-fu­el-based en­er­gy, as op­posed to the seem­ing­ly high cost of so­lar pow­er use at present.

"It's (so­lar pow­er) more ex­pen­sive now but over time will be cheap­er. Oil and coal are get­ting more ex­pen­sive not just in terms of find­ing them, but in terms of the en­vi­ron­men­tal costs. We're do­ing a large-scale ex­per­i­ment with our own at­mos­phere by re­leas­ing car­bon diox­ide in­to the air, which is af­fect­ing the cli­mate glob­al­ly." Smart al­so said a large­ly over­looked as­pect of the re­new­able en­er­gy rev­o­lu­tion was the ma­jor im­pact the de­vel­op­ment of the in­dus­try could have on class dis­tinc­tions and pro­vid­ing the ba­sis for a more eq­ui­table so­ci­ety. He be­lieves that for the amount of rev­enue the oil and gas in­dus­try cre­ates lo­cal­ly, the wealth dis­tri­b­u­tion could be greater.

T&T can al­so learn from var­i­ous re­gion­al mod­els. In ear­ly Oc­to­ber the largest so­lar pow­er plant in the Caribbean opened in Puer­to Ri­co. The plant has a 20-year con­tract with the state-owned util­i­ty com­pa­ny and will pro­vide pow­er to some 12,000 fam­i­lies an­nu­al­ly. Al­so this month So­laris En­er­gy opened a new fa­cil­i­ty in Bar­ba­dos ex­pand­ing their pro­duc­tion to in­clude not on­ly tra­di­tion­al so­lar wa­ter heaters but a new line of vac­u­um tube heaters and so­lar elec­tric prod­ucts.

Al­though the Gov­ern­ment has start­ed ex­plor­ing re­new­able en­er­gy, the Min­istry of En­er­gy's re­new­able-en­er­gy ad­vis­er Randy Ra­mad­har Singh said en­er­gy was still 99 per cent gas-based lo­cal­ly. He said while Gov­ern­ment was com­mit­ted to com­ply­ing with var­i­ous in­ter­na­tion­al treaties on sus­tain­able en­er­gy to which T&T was a sig­na­to­ry, such as the Ky­oto Pro­to­col, the "fair­ly large in­dus­tri­al sec­tor makes it hard­er to ac­com­plish."

Since 2008 there has been a push from gov­ern­ment to in­crease re­new­able en­er­gy use. In 2008, a Re­new­able En­er­gy Com­mit­tee es­tab­lished by Cab­i­net has been re­spon­si­ble for de­vel­op­ing the frame­work for a re­new­able en­er­gy pol­i­cy. How­ev­er, Singh says, the frame­work was on­ly used to in­form the draft na­tion­al en­er­gy pol­i­cy which will go to Par­lia­ment be­fore the end of the year.

In 2010, then Fi­nance Min­is­ter Win­ston Dook­er­an an­nounced in the 2010/2011 bud­get a 150 per cent tax al­lowance for com­pa­nies com­mis­sion­ing en­er­gy au­dits and ac­quir­ing re­new­able equip­ment. There is al­so a 25 per cent tax in­cen­tive for re­new­able equip­ment for house­holds, to a max­i­mum val­ue of $10,000. In the 2012/2013 bud­get, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Lar­ry Howai re­it­er­at­ed the Gov­ern­ment's com­mit­ment to a so­lar pow­er plant and an­nounced a na­tion­al wind re­source as­sess­ment pro­gramme, a pi­lot wind-pow­ered elec­tric­i­ty pro­gramme on the east coast.

A num­ber of com­mu­ni­ty projects have al­so been start­ed, in­clud­ing so­lar-pow­ered lights for the Ch­aguara­mas board­walk and for 15 com­mu­ni­ty cen­tres through­out Trinidad. So­lar pow­er is al­so sched­uled to be in­stalled in the IT rooms of 25 schools by the first quar­ter of next year. Yet Singh said the min­istry's role was mere­ly to con­duct re­search and pro­vide in­cen­tives. "The up­take on these in­cen­tives is re­al­ly up to the pop­u­la­tion," he said.