Ryan Ba­choo

Lead Ed­i­tor - News­gath­er­ing

ryan.ba­choo@cnc3.co.tt

In Dubai

Co-founder of Light­source bp, Dr Vi­cente Lopez Ibor May­or, is back­ing the Light­source project in T&T say­ing it can be a thrust in this coun­try’s en­er­gy tran­si­tion and of­fer op­por­tu­ni­ties in clean en­er­gy.

Light­source bp, an in­ter­na­tion­al so­lar busi­ness, start­ed con­struc­tion on T&T’s first util­i­ty-scale PV project in April. It is a 148MWp project owned by oil sub­sidiaries bp Al­ter­na­tive En­er­gy Trinidad and To­ba­go and Shell Re­new­ables Caribbean. The project is split over two sites—Brechin Cas­tle (122MWp) and Or­ange Grove (26MWp)—and is ex­pect­ed to gen­er­ate around 300,000MWh of pow­er a year.

May­or, who chaired Light­source bp for sev­en years, spoke to Guardian Me­dia at COP28 in Dubai. He stepped down as chair­man in 2018. While he said he isn’t up to date with the cur­rent Light­source bp project on­go­ing in T&T, he has vis­it­ed the coun­try twice be­fore for en­er­gy-re­lat­ed mat­ters and is buoyed by what he saw.

He told Guardian Me­dia: “I think it’s very im­por­tant for the coun­try—this sort of de­vel­op­ment of clean en­er­gy. So I think it is some­thing that can be ramped up and cre­ate a new plat­form or di­men­sion of clean en­er­gy.”

Dr May­or said such a move could al­so open up the pos­si­bil­i­ties of hi­ber­na­tion.

With his knowl­edge of T&T, Dr May­or has al­so backed the ex­plo­ration of wind en­er­gy, say­ing: “In prin­ci­ple, I haven’t seen any par­tic­u­lar dif­fi­cul­ties in or­der to im­ple­ment and de­ploy wind from one side, so­lar from an­oth­er and have the two to­geth­er. I be­lieve this could be a busi­ness case. In my opin­ion, the an­swer is quite clear, yes, it can be done.”

Dr May­or fo­cus­es his en­er­gy on so­lar pow­er. In T&T’s en­er­gy tran­si­tion, the res­i­den­tial move to so­lar pow­er has been slow or stalled al­to­geth­er. So­lar in­fra­struc­ture is still large­ly ex­pen­sive in the coun­try while get­ting clear­ance has to go all the way to the top of the Min­istry of Pub­lic Util­i­ties. To stave off the chal­lenge of high costs, the Spaniard says the gov­ern­ment must in­cen­tivise so­lar pow­er at dif­fer­ent lev­els.

He said: “You need in­cen­tives and po­lit­i­cal in­cen­tives from the en­er­gy and cli­mate pol­i­cy. If you have the prop­er and pre­cise eco­nom­ic and reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work, you can do it.” Those in­cen­tives, he says, should al­so in­clude and en­cour­age so­lar com­pa­nies to en­ter the T&T mar­ket.

“You should have the reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work to cre­ate the at­trac­tion of this fi­nan­cial pres­ence in the coun­try and I be­lieve there are many tech­niques in the reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work that you can ac­ti­vate like tax cred­its, mech­a­nisms of reg­u­la­to­ry sup­port of re­new­ables and con­di­tions of so­cial re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of en­vi­ron­ment di­men­sions,” he added.

Dr May­or says any en­er­gy tran­si­tion is con­nect­ed with po­lit­i­cal will and the need for clear reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work as well as clear de­car­bon­i­sa­tion ob­jec­tives.

“T&T has been an ex­am­ple of de­vel­op­ment in en­er­gy but now they have to do it in en­er­gy tran­si­tion,” he stat­ed.

He went fur­ther: “If they take the lead­er­ship in this area in the Caribbean and Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, it’s amaz­ing the things you can do. I be­lieve this would be very good for the coun­try and very good for the con­sumers.”

Asked whether he is sat­is­fied with T&T’s en­er­gy tran­si­tion progress since he last vis­it­ed the coun­try, Dr May­or said, “You can­not be in the mid­dle of the bridge for­ev­er. You have to start on the way and get to the des­ti­na­tion.”

Full own­er­ship

On No­vem­ber 30, bp an­nounced it agreed to ac­quire the 50.03 per cent in­ter­est it does not al­ready own in Light­source bp, one of the world’s lead­ing de­vel­op­ers and op­er­a­tor of util­i­ty-scale so­lar and bat­tery stor­age as­sets.

The par­ties agree that now is the right time for bp to take full own­er­ship, en­abling Light­source bp’s con­tin­u­ing growth and high per­for­mance.

Un­der their agree­ment, bp will ac­quire the re­main­ing stake in Light­source bp from the com­pa­ny’s founders, man­age­ment, and staff.

The par­ties agreed a base eq­ui­ty val­ue of £254 mil­lion (about US$320 mil­lion) for the 50.03 per cent in­ter­est. The sell­ing share­hold­ers will al­so have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­ceive fur­ther pay­ment over time, de­pen­dent on com­pa­ny per­for­mance and the mar­ket val­ue of pre-agreed as­sets di­vest­ed from the port­fo­lio.

For full year 2022, Light­source bp re­port­ed un­der­ly­ing EBIT­DA of £287 mil­lion and at the ef­fec­tive trans­ac­tion date, 31 De­cem­ber 2022, had cor­po­rate lev­el debt ad­just­ed for cash of £1.5 bil­lion, ex­clud­ing project fi­nance.

In a state­ment, bp said that full own­er­ship would now en­able it to fur­ther scale up Light­source bp and cre­ate ad­di­tion­al val­ue by ap­ply­ing bp’s com­ple­men­tary ca­pa­bil­i­ties and strengths—in­clud­ing in fi­nance and trad­ing—ful­ly to the busi­ness. bp will con­tin­ue to tar­get dou­ble dig­it eq­ui­ty re­turns from this busi­ness.

In ad­di­tion, bp in­tends to use Light­source bp’s world-class ca­pa­bil­i­ties as a de­vel­op­er of cost-com­pet­i­tive util­i­ty-scale on­shore re­new­able pow­er to help meet its own de­mand for low car­bon pow­er. This in­te­gra­tion is ex­pect­ed to un­der­pin and de-risk de­liv­ery of bp’s tar­gets for its tran­si­tion growth en­gines—in hy­dro­gen, EV charg­ing and bio­fu­els as well as in pow­er trad­ing.

An­ja-Is­abel Dotzen­rath, bp ex­ec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent for gas and low-car­bon en­er­gy, said: “This is a nat­ur­al evo­lu­tion of the part­ner­ship we have built over the past six years—now we will be able to take Light­source bp to the next lev­el of prof­itable growth and per­for­mance.

“We will con­tin­ue to scale this suc­cess­ful busi­ness, and al­so ap­ply its ca­pa­bil­i­ties and ex­per­tise to help meet bp’s grow­ing de­mand for low car­bon pow­er from our tran­si­tion growth en­gines. I look for­ward to wel­com­ing the Light­source bp team to bp and am con­fi­dent that to­geth­er we can fur­ther strength­en its po­si­tion as a lead­ing glob­al re­new­ables de­vel­op­er.”