The dread­ed but long-ex­pect­ed an­nounce­ment from the Reg­u­lat­ed In­dus­tries Com­mis­sion (RIC) of high­er rates for res­i­den­tial, com­mer­cial and in­dus­tri­al cus­tomers of the T&T Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (T&TEC) will, in­evitably, have ma­jor reper­cus­sions across al­most every sec­tor in this coun­try.

For res­i­den­tial cus­tomers, who will now pay as much as 64 per cent more on the bills that will now be gen­er­at­ed month­ly, this adds to cost of liv­ing chal­lenges, par­tic­u­lar­ly for low- and mid­dle-in­come house­holds.

And this may just be the first blow, since there is al­so a rate re­view ap­pli­ca­tion from the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) pend­ing be­fore the RIC.

For T&TEC, which has not had an in­crease in its rates for 17 years, there is the prospect of an in­crease in an­nu­al rev­enue from $3.2 bil­lion to $4.8 bil­lion and the chance to pow­er down its $5 bil­lion debt to the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny (NGC).

An in­crease in rev­enue should al­so mean an im­prove­ment in the qual­i­ty of ser­vice pro­vid­ed by the util­i­ty, in­clud­ing up­grad­ing pow­er gen­er­a­tion fa­cil­i­ties to meet the needs of a mod­ern, high­ly in­dus­tri­alised T&T.

How­ev­er, even with an im­proved, more fi­nan­cial­ly sta­ble T&TEC, there is the mat­ter of an un­sus­tain­able arrange­ment where more than 85 per cent of the elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­at­ed in this coun­try comes from nat­ur­al gas.

And with in­creas­ing de­mands for elec­tric­i­ty — a 70.18 per cent in­crease from 5.13 TWh to 8.73 TWh be­tween 2000 and 2021 — this rep­re­sents a big draw down on the coun­try’s nat­ur­al gas re­serves.

So, with the RIC’s an­nounce­ment of high­er T&TEC rates in fo­cus, it is time to look at the al­ter­na­tives for pow­er gen­er­a­tion that have been on the back burn­er for years.

At the cur­rent rate, it could be many years be­fore cus­tomers are lib­er­at­ed from the cur­rent arrange­ment of get­ting pow­er from a sin­gle in­ter­con­nect­ed grid fed by the in­de­pen­dent pow­er pro­duc­ers, the Pow­er Gen­er­a­tion Com­pa­ny of T&T (Pow­er­Gen), Trinidad Gen­er­a­tion Un­lim­it­ed (TGU) and Trin­i­ty Pow­er Ltd.

T&T lags be­hind some of its Caribbean neigh­bours in terms of har­ness­ing the ze­ro-car­bon tech­nolo­gies that are avail­able to gen­er­ate emis­sion-free elec­tric­i­ty.

The En­er­gy Min­istry is re­port­ed­ly spear­head­ing plans to in­crease the share of pow­er gen­er­at­ed from re­new­able en­er­gy such as so­lar and wind, and a Green Pa­per has been float­ing around for some time. But very lit­tle has been im­ple­ment­ed to date.

On pa­per, there is a com­mit­ment to source 20 per cent of this coun­try’s elec­tric­i­ty from re­new­ables by 2030 but there is not much ev­i­dence that even that mod­est tar­get can be met.

It is no small task, re­quir­ing in­vest­ments in so­lar farms and a suite of leg­isla­tive and pol­i­cy changes, as well as ad­just­ments in the pop­u­la­tion’s elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion habits.

There has been a high de­gree of com­pla­cen­cy and no sense of ur­gency in ef­fect­ing the need­ed changes be­cause un­til Thurs­day’s an­nounce­ment by the RIC, this coun­try en­joyed one of the low­est elec­tric­i­ty tar­iff rates in the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­ca.

How­ev­er, the prospect of hav­ing to stretch those dol­lars fur­ther to pay for elec­tric­i­ty should make cost-ef­fec­tive, en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly-friend­ly op­tions more at­trac­tive.

This is as good a time as any to pick up the pace and move more de­ci­sive­ly to­ward the re­new­able en­er­gy arrange­ments that have been promised for so long.