The Gov­ern­ment of the Re­pub­lic of Trinidad and To­ba­go (GORTT) and the Eu­ro­pean Union (EU) have agreed to the in­stal­la­tion of a com­mer­cial scale so­lar pan­el sys­tem, via a so­lar park, at Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port.

The so­lar park will have an an­nu­al gen­er­a­tion ca­pac­i­ty of 1,443,830 Kilo­watt hours (kWh).

Ac­cord­ing to a re­lease from the Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Min­istry, the project will be­gin dur­ing the first quar­ter of 2020, with im­ple­men­ta­tion tak­ing place over a pe­ri­od of 48 months.

The EU is fund­ing the project to the tune of €4 mil­lion, se­cured un­der its Eu­ro­pean De­vel­op­ment Fund (EDF) Unit.

The so­lar park project falls un­der the EU’s Glob­al Cli­mate Change Al­liance Plus Ini­tia­tive (GC­CA+). The GC­CA+ is a Eu­ro­pean Union flag­ship ini­tia­tive which is help­ing the world's most vul­ner­a­ble coun­tries to ad­dress cli­mate change.

In the re­lease, Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter, Camille Robin­son-Reg­is, says the project is rel­e­vant to the achieve­ment of this coun­try’s To­ba­go’s Na­tion­al De­vel­op­ment Strat­e­gy—Vi­sion 2030—as well as its com­mit­ments to the Unit­ed Frame­work Con­ven­tion on Cli­mate Change (UN­FC­CC) and the Paris Agree­ment.

“The project con­tributes pri­mar­i­ly to the pro­gres­sive achieve­ment of SDG Goal 13 on Cli­mate Ac­tion,” the min­is­ter notes, “but al­so pro­motes progress to­wards Goal 7 on Af­ford­able and Clean En­er­gy, 12 on Re­spon­si­ble Con­sump­tion and Pro­duc­tion and Goal 9 on In­dus­try, In­no­va­tion and In­fra­struc­ture.”

She adds: “This will al­so re­duce sig­nif­i­cant spend­ing on elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tion, re­sult­ing in sig­nif­i­cant fi­nan­cial sav­ings in en­er­gy con­sump­tion by the Air­ports Au­thor­i­ty of T&T.”

The Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment min­istry states that in ad­di­tion to help­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go meet its UN Cli­mate Change com­mit­ments, oth­er spe­cif­ic ob­jec­tives of the project in­clude: an in­crease in the avail­abil­i­ty and use of en­er­gy from re­new­able sources; and an in­crease in the ef­fi­cien­cy lev­els in the con­sump­tion of en­er­gy in T&T.

Oth­er or­gan­i­sa­tions in­volved in the over­all project in­clude the Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go (UTT); the Mul­ti­lat­er­al En­vi­ron­men­tal Agree­ments Unit (MEAU) of the Min­istry of Plan­ning; the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries; the Unit­ed Na­tions De­vel­op­ment Pro­gramme (UNDP); and the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA).