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Saturday, May 31, 2025

T&T’S electric surge

by

Peter Christopher
778 days ago
20230413

The in­creased cost of gaso­line in T&T has giv­en rise to a sig­nif­i­cant re­new­able en­er­gy push in the coun­try in­ad­ver­tent­ly, as the twin-is­land state has been recog­nised as one of the more pro­gres­sive users of elec­tric and hy­brid ve­hi­cles in the Caribbean.

The ob­ser­va­tion that T&T had been one of the Caribbean re­gion’s sur­prise adopters of elec­tric and hy­brid ve­hi­cles, was dis­cussed dur­ing a we­bi­nar re­view­ing the Topline Find­ings from the An­nu­al Caribbean Re­new­able En­er­gy Fo­rum-Castalia Re­new­able En­er­gy In­dex for the Caribbean.

“What was sur­pris­ing to me is a lot of op­ti­mism in Trinidad, de­spite nat­u­ral­ly Trinidad (be­ing known as) as an oil and nat­ur­al pro­duc­er,” said David Gumbs, a di­rec­tor of Rocky Moun­tain In­sti­tute dur­ing the we­bi­nar.

How­ev­er, Bar­ba­di­an econ­o­mist Justin Ram ex­plained that the move was dri­ven more by eco­nom­ic than en­vi­ron­men­tal fac­tors, as the coun­try had seen sev­er­al ad­just­ments to the fu­el sub­sidy in the past decade. That has led to gas prices ris­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly while con­verse­ly, the coun­try’s elec­tric­i­ty rates re­mained among the low­est in the re­gion.

Ram said, based on this, he was sur­prised there weren’t even more peo­ple in the coun­try with elec­tric ve­hi­cles.

“The cost of elec­tric­i­ty is ac­tu­al­ly quite low. I’m very sur­prised that there hasn’t been more up­take of peo­ple us­ing elec­tric ve­hi­cles. And I think as peo­ple look at the eco­nom­ics of this be­cause what’s hap­pen­ing there is that the fu­el sub­si­dies for petrol and diesel have been grad­u­al­ly go­ing down. So, there­fore, the mar­ket prices of those fu­els have been go­ing up, which is go­ing to start to lead to a nat­ur­al shift of peo­ple look­ing to al­ter­na­tive fu­els or elec­tric mo­bil­i­ty,” said Ram.

He how­ev­er did note there were a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of hy­brid ve­hi­cles on Trinidad and To­ba­go’s roads.

“So I think that’s what’s hap­pen­ing there, and if peo­ple look at eco­nom­ics, if you’re pay­ing five US cents per kilo­watt hour, you know it makes sense to go elec­tric. What’s al­so been hap­pen­ing there, be­cause I was there re­cent­ly, is that you have a lot of hy­brid ve­hi­cles as well. So, you have plug-in hy­brids, that sort of thing is al­so gain­ing a lot of sup­port. So it’s a move in the right di­rec­tion,” he said.

How­ev­er, it was not­ed that de­spite in­creased de­mand for elec­tric ve­hi­cles on the is­land, the cost of an elec­tric ve­hi­cle gen­er­al­ly was more ex­pen­sive than its com­bus­tion en­gine coun­ter­parts.

“One thing I think pol­i­cy­mak­ers are go­ing to have to look at is the for­eign used ve­hi­cle mar­ket. Be­cause there’s still a lot of ICE (In­ter­nal Com­bus­tion En­gines) for­eign-used ve­hi­cles that are com­ing in, and those tend to be con­sid­er­ably low­er priced than new ve­hi­cles and in par­tic­u­lar, even the elec­tric ve­hi­cles that are com­ing in,” said Ram.

The Gov­ern­ment in­tro­duced a tax con­ces­sion for hy­brid ve­hi­cles un­der 1599cc in 2017, in a bid to re­duce the coun­try’s car­bon foot­print. How­ev­er, in his bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion in 2020, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert re­moved tax con­ces­sions on all ve­hi­cles amid grow­ing con­cerns about for­eign ex­change avail­abil­i­ty in the coun­try, as the im­por­ta­tion of ve­hi­cles had been iden­ti­fied as a sig­nif­i­cant drain on the coun­try’s for­eign ex­change.

Im­bert said then that US$400 mil­lion is spent on the im­por­ta­tion of 25,000 cars.

How­ev­er last year, the Min­is­ter rein­tro­duced con­ces­sions on elec­tric and hy­brid ve­hi­cles as fu­el prices around the globe surged.

De­spite the rein­tro­duc­tion of the con­ces­sion, both new and used car deal­ers stat­ed the cost of im­port­ing pre­ferred elec­tric and hy­brid ve­hi­cles re­mained most­ly more cost­ly than tra­di­tion­al com­bus­tion en­gine ve­hi­cles.

Tues­day’s we­bi­nar al­so ac­knowl­edged that Trinidad and To­ba­go had shown oth­er strides con­cern­ing re­new­able adop­tion as it, sig­nif­i­cant­ly, had been one of the coun­tries that had agreed to adopt elec­tric bus­es.

He said moves like this, as well as mar­ket trends, sug­gest that the price of an elec­tric ve­hi­cle could be on the way down soon.

“One more to add in terms of the cost, the mar­ket is shift­ing, so the costs will go down as more vol­ume and more op­tions come to the re­gion. All the ma­jor man­u­fac­tur­ers are shift­ing to­wards hy­brid and elec­tric, so come 2025 and on­ward you’re go­ing to see all-elec­tric ve­hi­cles avail­able. So I think the costs will go down sig­nif­i­cant­ly. Trinidad just launched a pro­cure­ment for gosh, 70 per cent of its bus fleet. Bermu­da did one last year. Bar­ba­dos did one the year be­fore. I think Bermu­da is now done,” said Gumbs

David Ehrhardt Chief Ex­ec­u­tive of Castil­la how­ev­er not­ed that based on the in­for­ma­tion gath­ered, the switch to elec­tric ve­hi­cles had al­so proved to be more eco­nom­ic in terms of main­te­nance costs.

“We did a study of the elec­tri­fi­ca­tion of bus­es in Ja­maica. And in­ter­est­ing­ly, the all-in cost of elec­tric bus­es, and the life­time cost of op­er­a­tions and own­er­ship are less al­ready than the cost of new diesel bus­es. And so that’s pret­ty ex­cit­ing. And it means that there’s an op­por­tu­ni­ty to save mon­ey al­ready in tran­sit. If the rate of the fi­nanc­ing for the elec­tric bus­es which will have a high­er up­front cost can be worked out.”

How­ev­er, he did not see the wider Caribbean adopt­ing elec­tric ve­hi­cles for per­son­al or pri­vate use based on the da­ta col­lect­ed in their sur­veys as the ini­tial cost to switch re­mained ex­pen­sive, while in­fra­struc­ture for such ve­hi­cles was still min­i­mal in most states.

“I sus­pect that many may be past the tip­ping point where the all-in cost of the parts of the elec­tric ve­hi­cle is ac­tu­al­ly less. But then we have bar­ri­ers like the fi­nanc­ing, the up­front costs, the lack of charg­ing sta­tions, and so on. And that means that al­though I’m pret­ty op­ti­mistic that the Caribbean will move to a lot hav­ing a lot of elec­tric ve­hi­cles in the medi­um term, I’m not very op­ti­mistic about a big in­crease in elec­tric ve­hi­cles over the next year,” said Ehrhardt.

Veron­i­ca Lizzio, Di­rec­tor of Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Prac­tice for Castalia, not­ed that in gen­er­al, the Caribbean had placed op­ti­mistic tar­gets con­cern­ing re­new­able en­er­gy tran­si­tion.

“About a third of the coun­tries are set­ting very am­bi­tious tar­gets of 100 per cent re­new­able en­er­gy. Of course, the tar­get years vary by coun­try but most of these coun­tries are tar­get­ing by 2030 or around 2030 to reach this very high lev­el of pen­e­tra­tion,” she said.

She said while there was some doubt about the achieve­ment of cer­tain tar­gets set, there were enough en­cour­ag­ing signs that the re­gion was head­ing in the right di­rec­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en the progress made in coun­tries such as Be­lize, Suri­name and Do­mini­ca.


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