PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher

@guardian.co.tt

A time­ly part­ner­ship be­tween two for­mer West In­dies crick­eters is be­ing hailed as a cru­cial push for the re­duc­tion of green­house gas emis­sions in T&T.

En­er­gy Min­is­ter Stu­art Young is hop­ing the launch of Go­Elec­tricTT, an elec­tric ve­hi­cle (EV) leas­ing and taxi ser­vice com­pa­ny found­ed by Ke­iron Pol­lard and Di­nanath Ram­nar­ine, will fur­ther en­cour­age pri­vate sec­tor util­i­sa­tion of elec­tric ve­hi­cles.

“Your tim­ing is per­fect be­cause right now the world is see­ing a rapid ex­pan­sion in the pro­duc­tion of elec­tric ve­hi­cles. So I hope that T&T and in par­tic­u­lar, the pri­vate busi­ness sec­tor would be re­spon­si­ble enough to come to you for the leas­ing of these ve­hi­cles,” said Young at the launch of the com­pa­ny at its St James lo­ca­tion on Sat­ur­day evening.

The com­pa­ny was found­ed ear­li­er this year af­ter the crick­eters ap­proached the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank (IDB) to se­cure ini­tial fi­nanc­ing for the ven­ture.

Ac­cord­ing to IDB coun­try rep­re­sen­ta­tive, Ju­lian Bel­grave, project fi­nanc­ing in­clud­ed re­sources from the founders at close to US$2 mil­lion, with the IDB Labs pro­vid­ing re­im­bursable fi­nanc­ing of US$500,000 and a grant of US$150,000.

Min­is­ter Young al­so hailed the fol­low-through of the crick­eters in this re­gard, as he not­ed that of­ten these op­por­tu­ni­ties are squan­dered.

“Thank you for the sup­port, be­cause one of the things I per­son­al­ly very of­ten have a fear of, is these mul­ti­lat­er­al lend­ing agen­cies take too long some­times to get things done, and some­thing like this could have been missed. So what you’ve done here is pur­pose­ly fea­si­ble and is go­ing to suc­ceed. I have no doubt about that,” said Young, who said the com­pa­ny would be a great help to the gov­ern­ment’s own tar­get of a 30 per cent re­duc­tion in emis­sions by 2030.

“To see two peo­ple like your­self rein­vest in T&T in a project like this au­gurs well for the fu­ture of T&T. So I ap­plaud you. This is the di­rec­tion the Gov­ern­ment is go­ing in. We are very, very con­scious of our re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to re­duce car­bon emis­sions,” said Min­is­ter Young.

Both crick­eters ex­plained the com­pa­ny was an at­tempt to set a pos­i­tive ex­am­ple, with Ram­nar­ine urg­ing the pri­vate sec­tor to fol­low their lead.

“This ven­ture al­so pro­vides a unique op­por­tu­ni­ty for cor­po­rate T&T to step up and meet their own sus­tain­abil­i­ty tar­gets. We take this mo­ment to en­cour­age cit­i­zens to build their con­ser­va­tion con­scious­ness and make smart, sus­tain­able choic­es for their trans­porta­tion needs,” said Ram­nar­ine, who ex­plained the idea for the com­pa­ny was hatched as far back as No­vem­ber 2022.

Pol­lard said the com­pa­ny was fo­cused on its long-term im­pact.

“As Di­nas men­tioned ear­li­er, we are deeply com­mit­ted to this project to ad­vance the cause of clean en­er­gy and elec­tric ve­hi­cles in T&T. While we are open for busi­ness and ready and wel­come every­one, we al­so en­cour­age each of you to join this move­ment,” said the for­mer West In­dies white ball cap­tain.

The event was al­so at­tend­ed by Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les, Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Pen­ne­lope Beck­les, Ma­yaro MP Rus­ton Paray and NGC Green chair­man Toni Sir­ju-Ram­nar­ine.