The So­lar Park Project has bro­ken ground at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port.

And ac­cord­ing to Min­is­ter of Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Pen­ne­lope Beck­les, a sig­nif­i­cant amount of work is un­der­way re­gard­ing de­sign ap­provals, pro­cure­ment and con­struc­tion works for the project.

The Pi­ar­co So­lar Park is a col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween the Gov­ern­ment of T&T, the Eu­ro­pean Union’s Glob­al Cli­mate Change Al­liance Plus (GC­CA+) and the Unit­ed Na­tions De­vel­op­ment Pro­gramme (UNDP).

As of No­vem­ber 2022, all of the pre­req­ui­site ac­tiv­i­ties re­lat­ed to the project were 100 per cent com­plete, the Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Min­istry stat­ed in a re­lease yes­ter­day.

Pro­cure­ment works were 48 per cent com­plete and con­struc­tion work 30 per cent com­plete, it stat­ed.

“The in­stal­la­tion of this com­mer­cial-scale so­lar farm at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port, rep­re­sents ac­tion that T&T is un­der­tak­ing, as­sist­ed by our in­ter­na­tion­al part­ners, to meet our cli­mate change com­mit­ments un­der the Paris Agree­ment. These com­mit­ments are aimed at achiev­ing our Na­tion­al­ly De­ter­mined Con­tri­bu­tion, as part of the glob­al ef­fort to con­strain glob­al tem­per­a­tures to sur­viv­able lev­els, and to tar­get the sec­tors re­spon­si­ble for our high­est emis­sions, the pow­er gen­er­a­tion, trans­porta­tion and in­dus­tri­al sec­tors,” Beck­les stat­ed.

Beck­les stat­ed that this ini­tia­tive is a turn­ing point in the pow­er gen­er­a­tion sec­tor and in the na­tion­al cli­mate change agen­da.

“The ex­is­ten­tial threat posed by cli­mate change re­quires ac­tion by every coun­try, and the in­ter­na­tion­al cli­mate pol­i­cy frame­work has re­spond­ed through le­gal in­stru­ments re­quir­ing and guid­ing ac­tions to be un­der­tak­en. As part of im­ple­ment­ing the 2011 Na­tion­al Cli­mate Change Pol­i­cy, the ‘Strat­e­gy for Re­duc­tion of Car­bon Emis­sions (CRS-Car­bon Re­duc­tion Strat­e­gy)’ was de­vel­oped and adopt­ed in 2015, es­tab­lish­ing a mit­i­ga­tion ac­tion plan tar­get­ing the coun­try’s three main emit­ting sec­tors; elec­tri­cal pow­er gen­er­a­tion, in­dus­try, and trans­port, over the pe­ri­od 2013 - 2040. This was the pol­i­cy ba­sis for Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Na­tion­al­ly De­ter­mined Con­tri­bu­tion or NDC, and rep­re­sents our com­mit­ment to re­duce green­house gas emis­sions as re­quired un­der the Paris Agree­ment. In ad­di­tion, this project demon­strates the Gov­ern­ment’s com­mit­ment to the na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment strat­e­gy, Vi­sion 2030 through the at­tain­ment of SDG 13: Cli­mate Ac­tion,” Beck­les stat­ed.

The Glob­al Cli­mate Change Al­liance Plus (GC­CA+) is a flag­ship ini­tia­tive of the Eu­ro­pean Union, geared to­wards help­ing the world’s most vul­ner­a­ble coun­tries to ad­dress the is­sue of cli­mate change.

T&T, through the Min­istry of Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment, was able to part­ner with the Del­e­ga­tion of the Eu­ro­pean Union, to en­sure that this coun­try was able to de­sign projects al­low­ing ac­cess to the GC­CA+ pro­gramme con­tribut­ing to the achieve­ment of our NDC.

The so­lar farm, which is man­aged by the Air­ports Au­thor­i­ty, will con­sist of ground-mount­ed so­lar pan­els in­stalled over an area of 1.54 hectares with an an­nu­al gen­er­a­tion ca­pac­i­ty of 1,443,830 kilo­watt-hours (kWh), which rep­re­sents 7.1 per cent of the to­tal amount of elec­tric­i­ty con­sumed at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port.

This project could po­ten­tial­ly re­duce an­nu­al emis­sions of car­bon diox­ide by 1,010 met­ric tonnes, and con­tribute to an over­all re­duc­tion in Trinidad and To­ba­go’s car­bon foot­print.

Beck­les stat­ed that she is hope­ful that this so­lar farm at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port serves as an in­spi­ra­tion to the wider pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tors on the po­ten­tial of So­lar and Re­new­able En­er­gy, “as we do our part for a bet­ter plan­et for all of us.”