Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor - News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

Glob­al­ly, re­new­ables are be­com­ing more and more ac­ces­si­ble, and far cheap­er than any time in his­to­ry, but this is one glob­al trend strug­gling to take hold in the Caribbean. In­stead, so­lar busi­nes­sown­ers in Trinidad and To­ba­go (T&T) and in­dus­try ex­perts re­port a grad­ual uptick in in­ter­est in so­lar en­er­gy and a slow de­cline in cost re­gion­al­ly.

The glob­al pic­ture is en­cour­ag­ing. Ac­cord­ing to the In­ter­na­tion­al Re­new­able En­er­gy Agency’s (IRE­NA) 2024 re­port on Re­new­able Pow­er Gen­er­a­tion Costs, re­new­ables re­mained the most cost-com­pet­i­tive op­tion for new elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tion last year, with 91 per cent of new­ly com­mis­sioned util­i­ty-scale ca­pac­i­ty de­liv­er­ing pow­er at a low­er cost than the “cheap­est, new­ly in­stalled fos­sil fu­el-based al­ter­na­tive.”

Ac­cord­ing to IRE­NA, re­new­ables helped avoid $US467 bil­lion in fos­sil fu­el costs last year.

Nat­ur­al gas stumps so­lar in T&T

Just over a year ago, a small team head­ed by Kevin Ram­se­wak start­ed a so­lar busi­ness called Soltas­tic Boyz So­lu­tions. The in­spi­ra­tion came af­ter work­ing on a Na­ture Seek­ers so­lar project un­der the Green Cli­mate Fund. He was sur­prised at how rapid­ly his so­lar busi­ness start­ed to grow. So much so, they set up a booth at the Trade and In­vest­ment Con­ven­tion (TIC) this year.

“We had over 300 in­ter­ac­tions at TIC and then for the spin­off af­ter, in terms of site vis­its, we had in ex­cess of 50 site vis­its, which led to a cou­ple of jobs a week,” Ram­se­wak told the Busi­ness Guardian in an in­ter­view this week.

He says their small busi­ness has on­ly seen “small jobs” in so­lar, but they have re­cent­ly man­aged to land the in­stal­la­tion of so­lar pan­els at a ma­jor es­tate in east Trinidad that deals with co­coa pro­duc­tion. Those small jobs com­prise peo­ple who are liv­ing in rur­al com­mu­ni­ties with no ac­cess to elec­tric­i­ty.

How­ev­er, he says there is al­so in­ter­est from res­i­den­tial cus­tomers. While it may not lead to a full in­stal­la­tion at their homes, some are in­ter­est­ed in par­tial in­stal­la­tion.

Ram­se­wak ex­plained, “We have con­sul­ta­tions with a lot of res­i­den­tial cus­tomers, and we cre­ate an en­er­gy bud­get for them so they would see how much en­er­gy they use from their homes. A lot of them, if they don’t go to­tal­ly so­lar, they will try to cut off cer­tain things like dry­ers and wash­ing ma­chines and choose to go so­lar with those ap­pli­ances, there­fore cut­ting the elec­tric­i­ty bill. We had a lot of peo­ple in­stalling so­lar pow­er for wa­ter heaters. They re­alised the old wa­ter heaters draw so much of elec­tric­i­ty, they could use this sys­tem where we just cut that part out of the bill.”

Ha­roon Soo­brat­tee, on the oth­er hand, has been in the so­lar busi­ness for the last 15 years and he’s con­tributed to a num­ber of re­new­able sto­ries in the Guardian down the years. He has wit­nessed a re­duc­tion in the price of so­lar equip­ment low­er since he start­ed his busi­ness in 2010.

“We’ve seen the pric­ing of most ma­jor com­po­nents fall, es­pe­cial­ly in the past two to three years. The prices of our spe­cial lithi­um bat­ter­ies have fall­en. That, cou­pled with the re­moval of the 20 per cent du­ty by the gov­ern­ment, has helped bring down the cost.”

Yet, he jokes that for some­one who is in the busi­ness of sell­ing so­lar en­er­gy, his home runs on elec­tric­i­ty, main­ly due to the af­ford­able cost of the lat­ter in T&T.

“My home elec­tric­i­ty bill for the en­tire year is about $4,000. If I tell any­one in the Caribbean that, they’re go­ing to open their eyes wide, be­cause they pay five to six times what we pay.”

As­sis­tant pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T, Dr Cur­tis Boodoo, said some com­mer­cial busi­ness­es in this coun­try are turn­ing to re­new­ables to re­duce their car­bon foot­print.

“There have been quite a lot of in­di­vid­u­als as well who own so­lar in T&T or so­lar sys­tems be­cause they be­lieve in re­duc­ing their car­bon foot­print and they want to see en­er­gy in­de­pen­dence,” Boodoo added.

En­er­gy de­pen­dence is be­com­ing more and more of a con­cern. Both Ram­se­wak and Soo­brat­tee said, since the es­ca­la­tion of ten­sions be­tween the Unit­ed States and Venezuela, they have re­ceived a num­ber of en­quiries from po­ten­tial res­i­den­tial con­sumers, who want to en­sure their homes will re­main en­er­gy se­cured in the case of a con­flict.

How­ev­er, both busi­ness­men said cost con­tin­ues to be a ma­jor con­cern for cus­tomers. Bridg­ing that gap has proven chal­leng­ing for the re­gion. Be­yond the cost of re­new­ables, the threats fos­sil fu­els pose to the re­gion through cli­mate change are al­so forc­ing the Caribbean to tran­si­tion away from fos­sil fu­els.

The re­new­ables strug­gle in the re­gion

On the side­lines of COP30 in Belem Brazil, this week, the Busi­ness Guardian sat down with ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of the Caribbean Cen­tre for Re­new­able En­er­gy and En­er­gy Ef­fi­cien­cy (CCREEE), Dr. Mo­ham­mad Rafik Nagdee. He said there are four fac­tors im­pact­ing the rapid de­cline of costs in re­new­ables in the re­gion.

The first, he said, is scale.

“The mar­kets in the north are ex­treme­ly sub­stan­tial. They’re pro­duc­ing at such a large scale that we’re talk­ing about hun­dreds and thou­sands of so­lar pan­els at a time. We’re look­ing at megawatts of pro­cure­ment. The fun­da­men­tal re­al­i­ty of the Caribbean is that we don’t, as a re­gion or as a na­tion­al en­ti­ty, pic­ture at that scale, so one of the chal­lenges we’re fac­ing is that we’re not be­ing tak­en se­ri­ous­ly by man­u­fac­tur­ers,” Nagdee ex­plained,

He al­so point­ed to the ge­og­ra­phy of the re­gion, not­ing the chal­lenges with trans­porta­tion and lo­gis­tics to be able to get the tech­nol­o­gy to Caribbean. He said there will be a high­er markup in the cost for stor­age at the ports on both sides. “We’re talk­ing about de­mur­rage, we’re talk­ing about in­sur­ance, we’re talk­ing about cus­toms, and the list goes on,” Nagdee ex­plained.

An­oth­er key fac­tor, he said is fi­nanc­ing where the re­gion has a high­er risk in terms of its fi­nanc­ing mech­a­nisms to be able to fa­cil­i­tate the up­front cost as­so­ci­at­ed with re­new­able en­er­gy.

Fi­nal­ly, Nagdee said the re­gion’s in­nate cli­mate vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties pro­vide a chal­lenge for de­sign­ers and man­u­fac­tur­ers.

“The storms and hur­ri­canes, the lev­el of de­vel­op­ment or de­sign for the tech­nolo­gies that we are need to use with­in the con­text of the re­gion, are a much high­er spec than those that are pro­duced for the North. The fact is we have cat­e­go­ry four and cat­e­go­ry five hur­ri­canes that come through now, year in and year out.”

With T&T be­ing an out­lier, Nagdee says the rest of the re­gion could some­times pay 40 per cent more for elec­tric­i­ty than those in the Unit­ed States.

He says CCREEE is hav­ing dis­cus­sions with the mul­ti­lat­er­al de­vel­op­ment banks like the Caribbean De­vel­op­ment Bank to try to iden­ti­fy con­ces­sion­al rates in or­der to re­duce the risk of be­ing able to pay back the loans.

Clarke: Re­new­able ex­pense a pub­lic good

Joyelle Clarke, who serves as St Kitts and Nevis’ Min­is­ter of Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment, En­vi­ron­ment and Cli­mate Ac­tion and Con­stituen­cy Em­pow­er­ment, told the Busi­ness Guardian at COP30, while she un­der­stands the high costs of re­new­ables, fos­sil fu­els have al­so been in­cen­tivised in a great way.

She said, “What we’re see­ing glob­al­ly that the num­bers are say­ing that it is cheap­er to in­vest in re­new­able en­er­gy be­cause of the fos­sil fu­el sub­si­dies. It may ap­pear to us that it is cheap­er in our re­gion to use fos­sil fu­els, but it’s very ex­pen­sive. It’s one of the high­est costs of im­por­ta­tion for coun­tries like St. Kitts. Diesel is ex­pen­sive. Gen­er­at­ing it is ex­pen­sive. But the chal­lenge and the ex­pense that we’re recog­nis­ing is that the tran­si­tion to re­new­able en­er­gy - get­ting the bat­tery stor­age, putting acres of land un­der so­lar, get­ting house­holds ready to have so­lar pan­els in­stalled - that’s the ex­pense. That’s the ex­pense that has to be seen as a pub­lic good.”

In the end, the Caribbean’s re­al test is not whether re­new­ables are cheap, but whether lead­ers are will­ing to treat the en­er­gy tran­si­tion as a col­lec­tive in­vest­ment in sur­vival.