Joel Julien

joel.julien@guardian.co.tt

Two ma­jor so­lar projects that will gen­er­ate so­lar en­er­gy in this coun­try at a cost on par with cur­rent elec­tric­i­ty prices have been an­nounced by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley.

Row­ley made the state­ment yes­ter­day as he de­liv­ered the fea­ture ad­dress at the En­er­gy Cham­ber’s vir­tu­al En­er­gy Ef­fi­cien­cy and Re­new­ables Con­fer­ence ti­tled “Shap­ing the Caribbean’s En­er­gy Fu­ture.”

He said the Roadmap to Re­cov­ery team rec­om­mend­ed stim­u­lat­ing ac­tiv­i­ty in the area of en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy and set­ting am­bi­tious tar­gets for in­creased pow­er gen­er­a­tion from re­new­ables.

“To this end, as you may be aware, the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries (MEEI) re­cent­ly an­nounced the win­ning bid in re­sponse to a Re­quest for Pro­pos­als (RFP) for Util­i­ty Scale Re­new­able En­er­gy Projects. A con­sor­tium formed by Light­source Re­new­able Glob­al De­vel­op­ment Lim­it­ed (Light­source BP), Shell Trinidad and To­ba­go Lim­it­ed and BP Al­ter­na­tive En­er­gy Trinidad and To­ba­go Lim­it­ed sub­mit­ted suc­cess­ful pro­pos­als for two projects,” Row­ley said.

“These projects will gen­er­ate 92.2 MW of elec­tric­i­ty from so­lar pho­to­volta­ic (PV) sources at Cou­va; and 20 MW of elec­tric­i­ty from so­lar PV sources at Trinci­ty, at a cost that is on par with the cur­rent elec­tric­i­ty prices in T&T,” he said.

These projects form part of an over­all plan by the gov­ern­ment to re­duce car­bon emis­sions in this coun­try by 2030.

“The aim of Trinidad & To­ba­go is to achieve a re­duc­tion in over­all emis­sions from the three sec­tors by 15 per cent by 2030 from Busi­ness as Usu­al (BAU), which in ab­solute terms is an equiv­a­lent of one hun­dred and three mil­lion tonnes of car­bon diox­ide equiv­a­lent,” he said.

In its Re­new­able En­er­gy Mar­ket Up­date for May 2020, the In­ter­na­tion­al En­er­gy Agency has not­ed that the Covid-19 cri­sis is neg­a­tive­ly im­pact­ing the glob­al growth in re­new­able pow­er ca­pac­i­ty.

“Now more than ever, re­new­able en­er­gy and en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy ini­tia­tives are need­ed as we come face to face with a rapid­ly chang­ing en­er­gy and eco­nom­ic land­scape, com­bined with the threat of cli­mate change,” Row­ley said.

“How­ev­er, in ad­di­tion to look­ing to re­new­able en­er­gy and en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy to se­cure a clean, sus­tain­able fu­ture for gen­er­a­tions to come, it is al­so our du­ty as the Gov­ern­ment of the Re­pub­lic of Trinidad and To­ba­go to en­sure that we are max­i­miz­ing the use of the coun­try’s rich nat­ur­al re­sources to the ben­e­fit of the cit­i­zens. We must, there­fore, re-ex­am­ine how we de­rive the great­est val­ue from our nat­ur­al gas,” he said.

Chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the En­er­gy Cham­ber Dr Thack­wray Dri­ver de­scribed Row­ley’s an­nounce­ment as a game-chang­er.

“I can’t help not­ing one thing in par­tic­u­lar when you were dis­cussing the util­i­ty scale so­lar your com­ment that we would be pro­duc­ing en­er­gy on par with lo­cal elec­tric­i­ty costs, now that’s a big an­nounce­ment be­cause lo­cal elec­tric­i­ty has been cheap and it has been his­tor­i­cal­ly cheap and if we’re able to pro­duce so­lar on par with that that’s a game-chang­er,” Dri­ver said.