IDB, CDB heads bat for clean energy in Caribbean
Sunday , October 25 2015, Citizen’s Report, Source
MIAMI, Florida — Heads of the Inter-American Bank (IDB) and the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), who participated in a high-level meeting of United States and Caribbean governments, utilities, development partners and energy sector stakeholders in this southern US city, took their arguments for a faster build out of renewable technologies in the region to the American media.
In an opinion piece in the Miami Herald on Tuesday, under the headline ‘Caribbean can benefit from cheap oil rice windfall’, the IDB’s Luis Alberto Moreno and the CDB’s Dr William Smith argued that “the Caribbean could emerge a winner from falling global oil prices” if it transitions to sustainable energy options.
In addition to falling prices, they said, the availability of financing mechanisms dedicated to the development of renewable energies was an aligning of the stars. The argument was the central theme of the three-day Caribbean Renewable Energy Forum (CREF) hosted by the Bureau of Energy Resources in the US Department of State, CREF, and New Energy Events at the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Miami.
“Low oil prices have created a unique opportunity,” the men opined. “The Caribbean could use this respite to begin to wean its economies off petroleum products and to switch to more stable and cleaner alternatives. Several governments are using this windfall to pay down debt. Others are taking advantage of the opportunity to trim expensive energy subsidies,” they wrote.
Moreno and Smith posit that investments could range from “relatively inexpensive energy-saving measures” to “big ticket projects” such as replacing base-load capacity using modern technologies. “Because of its geography, the Caribbean is ideal for deploying geothermal, solar and wind energy technologies. In some cases, hydroelectricity is a proven alternative. The costs of these technologies have decreased sharply since the 1980s. Small-scale solar systems have become so affordable that they are thriving in rural Haiti, and commercial wind farms are sprouting all around Jamaica,” The Herald piece said. Moreno and Smith, who, on the same day the article appeared, signed a US$71-million agreement to finance the development of geothermal projects in the Eastern Caribbean, acknowledged that there are challenges to the adoption of renewable energy insofar as the capability of the national grids and their viability are concerned . Still, they maintain that renewables are the best option given the cost of diesel, its effects on the environment, and the age of existing power plants.
“The Caribbean would require around US$3.7 billion to build new power plants said regasification terminals, retrofit old generators, provide adequate LNG hub capacity, and deploy small tankers to distribute gas,” the Miami Herald article said. It said, too, that public/private partnerships are the best ways to share costs, and pointed out that legal and regulatory provisions need to be updated in order to attract foreign investment.
