PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

T&T has the right tools to be­gin the tran­si­tion to­wards clean en­er­gy, but the coun­try’s cur­rent de­pen­dence on fos­sil fu­els in terms of rev­enue gen­er­a­tion must be care­ful­ly man­aged.

This was the as­sess­ment of Har­ry van Schaick, Man­ag­ing Ed­i­tor of the Ox­ford Busi­ness Group dur­ing a vir­tu­al event host­ed by RBC Trinidad and To­ba­go ti­tled Re­new­able En­er­gy—Tran­si­tion for Trinidad and To­ba­go which was re­cent­ly held.

Van Schaick not­ed that this coun­try did have the re­sources to be­gin the tran­si­tion, and could even adopt the mod­el of op­er­a­tion tak­en by its Caribbean neigh­bour Bar­ba­dos to be­gin the process.

He ac­knowl­edged that the re­cent surge in en­er­gy prices how­ev­er, cre­at­ed a sce­nario where re­liance on the en­er­gy sec­tor was even tempt­ing than be­fore, but he sug­gest­ed that tap­ping in­to the tran­si­tion soon­er rather than lat­er could even ben­e­fit the coun­try fur­ther.

“We’re re­fer­ring to re­duced de­pen­dence on the same fos­sil fu­els for eco­nom­ic growth. So cur­rent­ly, this might be hard to achieve for ob­vi­ous rea­sons as oil prices are see­ing his­toric lev­els at his­toric highs, and the temp­ta­tion re­mains to fo­cus on in­creas­ing fos­sil fu­el out­put. When we re­al­ly should be think­ing about this piv­ot,” said Van Schaick in his pre­sen­ta­tion, “I want to turn that point on its head. And re­al­ly tap­ping in­to Trinidad and To­ba­go’s vast, wind and so­lar po­ten­tial for do­mes­tic elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion would re­al­ly al­low it to ex­port more nat­ur­al gas and use that ex­tra rev­enue to fi­nance its own long-term En­er­gy Tran­si­tion Plans, as we’ve seen in oth­er mar­kets.”

Van Schaick said the fi­nan­cial sec­tor of this coun­try was al­so well placed to push in­vest­ment in­to clean en­er­gy, which was an­oth­er plus for the na­tion.

“We’re say­ing here is that we need to be smart about how we tran­si­tion, es­pe­cial­ly in hy­dro­car­bon rich economies, such as T&T, and re­al­ly build­ing in mech­a­nisms, I sup­pose to mit­i­gate the tran­si­tion risk. Now it was go­ing to the clean en­er­gy tran­si­tion will on­ly be suc­cess­ful with the sup­port of fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions with cli­mate fi­nance, lend­ing and broad­er in­vest­ment in green in­fra­struc­ture and in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Dar­ryl White, Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer while dri­ving the dis­cus­sion amongst the pan­el ques­tioned if all pow­er gen­er­a­tion in Trinidad and To­ba­go could be achieved by 2050 as he said “an en­tire ecosys­tem and in­fra­struc­tur­al change that would have to ac­com­pa­ny that.”

He al­so re­ferred to the Feb­ru­ary 16 is­land wide black­out which was re­port­ed­ly caused by a fall­en tree, as an­oth­er rea­son why re­view­ing the pow­er grid need­ed to be done.