NADALEEN SINGH

nadaleen.singh@guardian.co.tt

Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties Robert Le Hunte has said that the T&T Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (T&TEC) through its plant, Trinidad Gen­er­a­tion Un­lim­it­ed, is poised to deep­en its foot­print in re­new­able en­er­gy and there­fore when it starts to use re­new­able en­er­gy, the gas it us­es to gen­er­ate elec­tric­i­ty can now be sold thus gen­er­at­ing US-dol­lars for the coun­try.

Le Hunte made the dis­clo­sure yes­ter­day at the 2018 En­er­gy Con­fer­ence at the Hy­att ho­tel in Port-Of-Spain

Ac­cord­ing to Le Hunte, eight per cent of the gas pro­duced by NGC goes to pow­er gen­er­a­tion.

Le Hunte's com­ments come as com­plaints about the short­age of US cur­ren­cy due to low rev­enues from the En­er­gy sec­tor con­tin­ue.

"It should be not­ed that if T&TEC con­tin­ues to op­ti­mise its gas us­age, thus us­ing less gas to gen­er­ate elec­tric­i­ty, the ex­cess gas can be sold to the down­stream petro­chem­i­cal in­dus­tries. The ben­e­fits of that type of sce­nario would be the de­creased use of for­eign ex­change to pay for the gas, and the in­creased earn­ings of for­eign ex­change when it is sold."

He al­so spoke to re­porters dur­ing the Cof­fee Break on Day 2 of the con­fer­ence

Sub­stan­ti­at­ing his point, Le Hunte said there is an op­por­tu­ni­ty cost with the use of gas, and un­like oth­er Caribbean coun­tries, the price at which we bring in re­new­ables is go­ing to be very im­por­tant to us be­cause, "even with the ex­cess ca­pac­i­ty and even if you have to bring on new re­new­ables and bring on new PPAs, it might still be ben­e­fi­cial based on the gas that would be giv­en up and the fact that we could sell that gas to bring in ad­di­tion­al for­eign ex­change to us. This needs to be looked at. The maths be­hind it is get­ting clos­er and is some­thing that re­quires be­ing put on the agen­da."

What is clear Le Hunte said, is that there is need to be more ef­fi­cient.

He said T&T is car­ry­ing a cost as­so­ci­at­ed with pro­vid­ing gas for elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tion which could have been utilised for oth­er process­es.

He not­ed that the cur­rent price of elec­tric­i­ty has helped the coun­try's man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor and that T&T has got­ten some ben­e­fits as a re­sult, but "if we could al­low for ef­fi­cien­cy, if we could re­duce the gas we use, we could have gas that could be sold and bring in rev­enue for us."

Asked how much gas is ex­pect­ed to be saved as a re­sult of T&TEC deep­en­ing its foot­print in re­new­ables he said, "we are not 100 per cent fin­ished run­ning the num­bers and I can't give you that par­tic­u­lar fig­ure."

Re­fer­ring to the in­di­vid­ual con­sumer, Le Hunte urged mem­bers of the pub­lic to con­serve elec­tric­i­ty.

On the is­sue of the pro­posed rate in­crease in elec­tric­i­ty, he said the Reg­u­lat­ed In­dus­tries Com­mis­sion (RIC) is ex­pect­ed to make a pro­nounce­ment on that is­sue by June.