Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Pen­ne­lope Beck­les says the So­lar Farm project, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Eu­ro­pean Union’s Glob­al Cli­mate Change Al­liance Plus (GC­CA+), has been pro­gress­ing steadi­ly at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port dur­ing Feb­ru­ary and March.

In a state­ment yes­ter­day, she said sev­er­al tech­ni­cal tasks have been com­plet­ed, such as the in­stal­la­tion of 25 tonnes of pho­to­volta­ic (PV) ground mount­ed struc­tures, 960 PV mod­ules, a trans­former and high volt­age ca­bles.

Al­so be­ing in­stalled are fi­bre-op­tic ca­bles, in­vert­ers as well as a drainage sys­tem.

The min­is­ter said the aim of this ini­tia­tive is to in­crease the avail­abil­i­ty and use of en­er­gy from re­new­able sources, as well as to in­crease the ef­fi­cien­cy lev­els in the con­sump­tion of en­er­gy in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

She said, “Such ven­tures will pro­vide am­ple scope for re­duc­tions in green­house gas (GHG) emis­sions lo­cal­ly. This con­tributes to the ful­fil­ment of our goals re­gard­ing Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment Goal 7, Af­ford­able and Clean En­er­gy, as well as our com­mit­ment to Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Na­tion­al De­vel­op­ment Strat­e­gy, Vi­sion 2030, to Place the En­vi­ron­ment at the Cen­tre of So­cial and Eco­nom­ic De­vel­op­ment, ar­tic­u­lat­ed in Theme Five.”

GC­CA+ is a flag­ship ini­tia­tive of the Eu­ro­pean Union, geared to­wards pro­vid­ing sup­port to ad­dress the is­sue of cli­mate change.

Trinidad and To­ba­go, through the Min­istry of Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment’s Eu­ro­pean De­vel­op­ment Fund Unit, was able to part­ner with the Del­e­ga­tion of the Eu­ro­pean Union, to en­sure “we de­signed projects al­low­ing ac­cess to the GC­CA+ pro­gramme con­tribut­ing to the achieve­ment of our Na­tion­al­ly De­ter­mined Con­tri­bu­tion or NDC ac­cord­ing to the Paris Agree­ment,” she said.

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 767,034 kilo­watt-hours (kWh), which rep­re­sents 3.6 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 500 met­ric tonnes and con­tribute to an over­all re­duc­tion in Trinidad and To­ba­go’s car­bon foot­print.

The min­is­ter said the next steps for the project in­clude the com­ple­tion of elec­tri­cal wiring, drainage and ground­ing sys­tems; in­stal­la­tion of In­vert­ers, SCA­DA and CCTV sys­tem as well as the pre-com­mis­sion­ing process, which is ex­pect­ed to com­mence at the end of March 2023.