Casan­dra Thomp­son-Forbes

Pres­i­dent Gen­er­al of the Oil­field Work­ers Trade Union (OW­TU) An­cel Ro­get has ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment of not ef­fec­tive­ly main­tain­ing the T&TEC Cove Pow­er Sta­tion lo­cat­ed in the Cove Eco-In­dus­tri­al and Busi­ness Park. The pow­er sta­tion was com­mis­sioned on Oc­to­ber 3, 2009, to en­sure that To­ba­go could ad­e­quate­ly pro­vide a sus­tain­able elec­tric­i­ty sup­ply to res­i­dents.

Speak­ing to mem­bers of the me­dia dur­ing a news con­fer­ence held out­side the Cove Pow­er Plant in To­ba­go on Sat­ur­day, Ro­get said there were sev­er­al op­er­a­tional is­sues at the lo­ca­tion, as well as an im­pend­ing pri­vati­sa­tion. He said To­ba­go would con­tin­ue to be de­pen­dent on Trinidad for elec­tric­i­ty.

"What we have seen over time, is that T&TEC's man­age­ment sup­port­ed by suc­ces­sive Min­is­ters of Pub­lic Util­i­ties and es­pe­cial­ly this one in­clud­ed al­low­ing the fa­cil­i­ty to run down, not prop­er main­te­nance and so on, no prop­er train­ing for the per­son­nel who would op­er­ate on this fa­cil­i­ty and, there­fore, the net re­sult of that if we do not take stock, it would be an­oth­er one of their best mod­els. You know their best mod­el these days is to run these state en­ter­pris­es down and then tell you it's not per­form­ing and then tell you that the best way to deal with it is to put it in­to pri­vate hands," he said

Ro­get said if that was al­lowed to hap­pen, To­ba­go would be put back in­to a state of de­pen­den­cy and sub­ject­ed to in­creased elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion costs. He al­so said em­ploy­ees were at risk.

"That would spi­ral and be con­vert­ed to high­er rates of in­fla­tion for our To­ba­go com­rades and the To­ba­go peo­ple...It is the in­ten­tion of the Gov­ern­ment and the min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties, sup­port­ed by their Cab­i­net and the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance to run this fa­cil­i­ty down, and sup­port T&TEC and its in­ept man­age­ment in the lack of main­te­nance.

"I mean, you have a sit­u­a­tion where you have an in­stalled ca­pac­i­ty of some 84 megawatts be­ing able to pro­vide more than enough elec­tric­i­ty for the is­land, but at the same time you are tak­ing the fa­cil­i­ty back­ward both in terms of how you treat your per­son­nel that op­er­ates on the fa­cil­i­ty and in terms of lack of prop­er health and safe­ty and so on," he said

He said there were al­so pro­pos­als on the ta­ble for a for­eign com­pa­ny to man­age the fa­cil­i­ty to which the union ob­ject­ed.

"When this was con­cep­tu­alised, they want­ed to give a man­age­ment con­tract, that is to say, to al­low some pri­vate en­ti­ty to man­age it, a for­eign pri­vate en­ti­ty to op­er­ate it and man­age it and the OW­TU said no, no, no, that is cast­ing us back in­to a state of colo­nial­ism and de­pen­den­cy syn­drome and we said the way for that to be op­er­at­ed is to train your own na­tion­als, Trin­bag­o­ni­ans, To­bag­o­ni­ans to be able to step up to the plate and to be able to man­age it."

Ro­get is call­ing on the gen­er­al man­age­ment of T&TEC as well as the board to be hon­est with the coun­try about their im­pend­ing plans.

On No­vem­ber 19, a com­mis­sion­ing cer­e­mo­ny was held sig­nalling a 20 MW up­grade and ex­pan­sion val­ued at $139.5 mil­lion at the Cove Pow­er Sta­tion part of on­go­ing ef­forts by the T&T Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion to pro­vide To­bag­o­ni­ans with a re­li­able, high-qual­i­ty elec­tric­i­ty sup­ply.

Min­is­ter Robert Le Hunte, who spoke at the event, said the pow­er plant would see an end to fre­quent pow­er out­ages and black­outs on the is­land, while THA Chief Sec­re­tary Kelvin Charles said, it rep­re­sent­ed a dawn of new be­gin­nings for T&TEC and its op­er­a­tions in To­ba­go.