GreenRG says its plan could help cut the demand for energy by about 20 per cent.

Under a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Local Government signed last October, GreenRG has already completed testing and research of new solar technology for a range of uses, including in national and parochial offices and schools.

Now the company said it wants to move ahead with the setting up of the plant.

“We are actually looking to manufacture and assemble some of the technology here in Jamaica, as well as or export to other parts of the Caribbean, South America and even back to the United States. We are working on a plan that will also create jobs,” Alfred Heyer, managing director of GreenRG Management.

He said the parties are in final negotiations and so would not disclose too many details.

“What I can tell you, though, is that we are actually looking at a few places and in the process of making a decision on that which looks very favourable,” he said on Wednesday, at the first day of presentations at the seventh annual investment and capital markets conference.

Heyers said that with the rising cost of energy, it is imperative that alternatives be found and that renewable technology was one such option.

GreenRG plans to introduce high-efficient cooling systems and solar technology.

Explaining how the company will operate, Heyer said GreenRG will be making all the upfront investment in the technology and its implementation, while rewarding itself at the back end by sharing in the savings gain.

“We make our money by sharing in the savings over a long period of time; that’s how confident we are in our technology,” he said.

According to its website, GreenRG offers solutions that can reduce building lighting consumption by 50 to 80 per cent while lowering building maintenance and labour costs.

But already the country itself is also on a thrust to reduce the cost of energy by looking at different forms of renewable and efficient energy forms.

(CONSULTANT SERVICES)

GUYANA-REGIONAL
SUPPORT TO THE CARIBBEAN SUSTAINABLE ENERGY ROAD MAP
CONSULTING SERVICES
Technical Cooperation No. ATN/KF-12208-RG

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretariat has received financing from the Inter-American Development Bank toward the cost of the Support to the Caribbean Sustainable Energy Road Map, and intends to apply part of the proceeds for consultant services. The services include the mapping of all sustainable energy initiatives in CARICOM Member States and assess renewable energy potential and energy efficiency opportunity available as well as,   the identification of regional goals and specific targets for renewable energy and energy efficiency contributions to energy mix as well as for carbon emissions reduction in a strategic and targeted manner. This consultancy will be for a period of twenty-two (22) weeks.

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretariat now invites eligible consultants to indicate their interest in providing the services. Interested consultants must provide information indicating that they are qualified to perform the services (brochures, description of similar assignments, experience in similar conditions, availability of appropriate skills among staff, etc.). Consultants may associate to enhance their qualifications.

A consultant will be selected in accordance with the procedures set out in the Inter-American Development Bank: Policies for the Selection and Contracting of Consultants financed by the Inter-American Development Bank (July 2006 edition).

Interested consultants may obtain further information at the address below during office hours 08:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Mrs. Sandra Britton
Project Manager
CARICOM Secretariat
Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown
Guyana
Tel No: 592-222-0001 Ext: 3503

Expressions of interest must be e-mailed to sbritton@caricom.org and copied to jprimo@caricom.org by 10 February 2012 at 4:30 p.m.

The solar company said that the programme, to be built in Jamaica, will cost in the region of CAN$450 million or US$444.2 million.

When completed, the farm will “enhance and improve the nation’s energy infrastructure, as well as serve as a beacon to attract additional investment in the ICT (Information Communications Technology) and greentech sectors.”

Solamon’s senior vice president, Ainsley Brown, said the farm would represent one of the region’s first strategic private-public partnerships.

“In order to implement a solution of this magnitude sites, several parishes are being considered as future homes of one of three 50-acre plots that when conjoined will provide the Jamaican people with 60MW of clean electricity,” he said.

“This programme represents a comprehensive approach to renewable energy development, energy diversification, job creation and training for the 21st century,” Brown said.

“Its success will necessitate a level-headed and like-minded approach at the table, as we are offering to tackle and deal with all elements of risk cooperatively and openly examine the implications of carbon credits, fuel or foreign exchange savings, in order to share the greater benefits of solar with our partners, and the communities they serve over the lifetime of this deal.”

Brown said the mega-project would create many new jobs for Jamaicans, and with the completion of a requisite light manufacturing plant, will establish the island as a “bona-fide greentech hub.”

In addition to generating solar electricity and, thereby, reducing for future generations of Jamaicans an “imposing reliance” on fossil fuels, he said the new revenue from the sale of carbon credits will be directed toward establishing employee training and certification programmes, “required to build this and many other similar facilities across the Caribbean.”

“I believe the utility should not be the only one to benefit from the nation going green,” Brown said.

“JPS, as it currently stands, benefits from green initiatives, from not having to produce that energy, as well as the fuel-saving and foreign exchange saving, without passing anything onto the green investor or the customer at large,” he said.

The company said it is “excited” to deliver turnkey power plants using renewable solar energy as a resource to Caribbean and Central American countries, and develop mutually beneficial and long-term relationships around the world.

Source: Jamaica Gleaner

The announcement by President Michel Martelly is part of a US$45 million-plus energy package that aims to introduce electricity to thousands of people in this impoverished nation who otherwise illuminate their homes by candlelight.

The programme, ‘Give Me Light, Give Me Life’, seeks to build credit for rural Haitians as they take out loans to purchase small solar kits for charging their cellphones or computers.

It also aims to line streets with light posts in the countryside and repair power lines in poor neighbourhoods in the capital.

“If a country wants to talk about development, it’s imperative to talk about energy and electricity,” Martelly said at a news conference at a hotel in downtown Port-au-Prince.

The need for energy in Haiti is critical to the reconstruction of Haiti as the Caribbean country struggles to recover from a massive earthquake two years ago that devastated much of the southern half and initially displaced 1.5 million people.

The 40-year-old state-run Electricity of Haiti can only power 200,000 homes, Martelly said, and only 30 per cent of the population of 10 million has access to a power supply.

Even then, most parts of Haiti only have electricity for a few hours a day, forcing many businesses and some homes to rely on generators and expensive fuel imports.

The new programme will call on smaller Haitian banks to issue US$30 million in loans with an interest rate of seven per cent, payable over seven years. The credit will help families purchase solar kits that will each cost between US$250 and US$350.

The families in question live in two of the most remote corners of the country: the Grand-Anse, the mountainous tip of the western peninsula, and the Northwest province.

The programme seeks to give power supply to 200,000 households within two years before moving on to the rest of Haiti, Martelly said.

“We feel they have less access than the rest of the country,” said René Jean-Jumeau, secretary of state of energy.

Another part of the programme, budgeted for US$15 million, will give the government loans so that mayors in the countryside can line 375 kilometres (233 miles) of streets with lamps. It will begin in three years.

The government project will also focus on urban areas. It will repair street lights and electric posts in 10 popular neighbour-hoods with US$300,000 from the national treasury.

The programme joins other efforts to boost energy production in Haiti.

The Inter-American Develop-ment Bank last month said it approved a US$20 million grant to help refurbish Haiti’s Peligre hydroelectric plant, the country’s largest renewable energy-generation facility.

Ocean Thermal Energy Corporation (OTEC) of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, plans to build the Caribbean’s first commercial plant to exploit differences in ocean temperatures to generate electricity in the Bahamas.

The company hopes to start construction of the project, currently in the design phase, by the fourth quarter of 2012 and to have it in operation by 2015, producing up to 10 megawatts of power.

A second plant of similar size would follow in the Bahamas while the company is in discussions with the Caymans about a third.

“Everybody’s struggling with the cost of power and it’s only going to get worse,” said Jeremy Feakins, OTEC’s chairman and CEO.

The project would cost between US$150 million and US$185 million, Feakins said.

“We’re keeping our plants in the 10 to 15MW range,” he said. “We’ll be using off-theshelf components, greatly minimising construction risk.”

A pipe would be built along the seabed from the shore to a depth of about one mile, sucking up cold water like a straw.

This water, up to 20ºC below the surface temperature, would be put through a heat exchanger to condense ammonia, the operating fluid.

The liquid ammonia would then go through a heat exchange with surface water, turning it back into a gas but at a much high pressure so that it could drive the turbine and generate electricity.

The cold water would have several other uses after passing through the heat exchange.

Current plans call for it to be piped around the Baha Mar resort on New Providence, Bahamas, a type of air conditioning already used, in summer, by Toronto, with water drawn from Lake Ontario.

The company is also looking at growing strawberries and grapes on the island by running pipes through the soil to cool and irrigate it. Deep-sea water is particularly good for agriculture because it is nutrient rich yet pathogen free.

And it would be possible to use some of the energy to power desalination plants to provide drinking water. This would leave it with almost no waste water to return to the sea.

Another option would be to inject the waste water into on-shore wells from which it would gradually seep into the sea.

The idea of using ocean heat differentials to make electricity was first proposed by Jacques Arsene d’Arsonval, a French physicist, in 1881. One of his students built a plant in Cuba in 1930.

But it has received little attention since because other fuels were cheaper. Much of the practical research was conducted on Hawaii, where a demonstration plant was built after the oil price spikes of the 1970s.

“The US government has put billions of dollars behind the research over the years,” said Feakins.

In theory, ocean thermal energy becomes commercially viable when oil is around US$60 per barrel. With the Saudis promising to put a floor under the price of crude at US$100, and Goldman Sachs forecasting a 2012 peak of US$150, it looks as if the technology’s time may have come.

One of the problems with ocean thermal energy is that to scale up would require larger undersea pipes, and the largest currently available is just 2.5 metres in diameter, said Feakins. “That’s enough for a 50MW plant.”

Source: Jamaica Observer

Energy minister. Phillip Paulwell- Photo.

Phillip Paulwell, energy minister says the government will be looking to earnings from carbon credits, to replace some of the revenue lost through the planned removal of the general consumption tax on electricity.

In basic carbon credit trading, countries whose carbon emissions fall below a set allowance can sell the difference, in the form of credits, to other countries that exceed their limits.

Paulwell said the trade in carbon credits is now big business.

Yesterday, Paulwell reiterated the People’s National Party government’s commitment to the removal of the GCT from electricity.

He said tax would also be removed from renewable energy equipment and computers.

The project EUCARINET,  is a four-year INCONET Coordination Action whose main goal is to strengthen bi-regional sustainable policy dialogue on Science and Technology (including in the ICT field) between EU Member and Associated States and the Caribbean Region, the Caribbean ACP countries, the overseas departments, and the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs). The consortium will run under the coordination of APRE with the following partners: MENON, CIRAD, EGL, UAB, CARICOM, UWI, UAG, UNIBE, CITMA, UNA. It will cover the whole Caribbean, with partners in Italy, Belgium, France, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom, Guyana, Jamaica, Guadeloupe, Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Netherlands Antilles.

The main goal of the project is to establish a long lasting sustainable bi-regional multi-stakeholders policy dialogue on S&T at policy, programme and institutional (research entities) level, thus contributing to a threefold objective:

• Create the conditions of the sustainable multi-stakeholders policy dialogue on S&T between the European Union, its member states, its associated states and the Caribbean Region, leading to a joint definition of S&T co-operation policies;
• Foster interregional (UE-Caribbean) and intraregional cooperation in leading to the identification and prioritization of common research areas of mutual interest and benefit;
• Stimulate and support the participation of the Caribbean research stakeholders in FP7, with a first emphasis on the “People Programme”.

For reaching this purpose, EUCARINET will take advantage, among others, of the services and the experience made in WINDS-Caribe.

http://www.eucarinet.eu/

It has been four years since completing my Masters in Solar Energy at the University of New South Wales (Australia) in 2007. I was very optimistic and bright eyed about the future but at that point in time the solar energy sector was very different than today.

The big difference was the price per Watt (measure of electrical power) of a solar module was increasing.

The high demand for the raw material (silica) that the solar modules are made from pushed up the cost of the panels as a result of the solar energy industry competing with the computing industry for the same raw material. No longer was the solar industry just using the scraps of Silicon Valley. In 2009 the distortion has been corrected by a number of large silica processing plants coming online to feed the insatiable demand for solar power.

This year is special, as it has seen a rapid drop in the price per Watt that has more than offset the few years of price increases. So the question is what economic forces are responsible for this? Leaders in the industry are saying it is mainly caused by economies of scale. This is when factors that cause a producer’s average cost per unit to fall as the scale of output is increased. For many years the solar industry touters have made the claim that the price for solar energy will start to decrease as soon as production is scaled up and now this year it has come true. In some countries it is predicted that installed solar will reach grid parity at retail level without the need for Government subsidies by 2015.

There is a well renowned Engineer/Technology futurist (Ray Kuzweil) who takes things a step further and predicts that solar energy will be the dominant form of energy by 2030 as a result of extrapolating the solar power yearly production growth rate, which is 40% per year and also advances in related scientific fields such as nanotechnology. Even though solar power is less than 1 % of the world’s energy production today, it will still out pace traditional oil/coal because of the mathematical laws of the exponential function due to solar high production growth rate.

Basically we are at the beginning of a major shift in the entire energy chain. Our energy grid of today will become relics of yesterday as solar prices decrease steadily and oil/gas prices behave erratically with an increasing upward trend in step with the increasing cost of exploring and producing new reserves in unstable and or remote places of the world.

I have my own solar energy company based in Trinidad and Tobago (Smart Energy Limited) and I have recently been to a few green energy expos/conferences that have shown me first hand the incredible changes taking place all around the world in this field that are generating a lot of excitement. For instance Ontario Canada’s feed in tariff programme that allows residential and commercial individuals to feed and sell solar power into the grid at premium electricity rate has become very successful. As a result more distributed power generators are springing up all over Ontario. Locally, financial institutions are also getting in on the act to finance large-scale renewable energy projects, because of the reliable rate of return on investment they have seen abroad.

The most important aspect of solar energy for me is not the brilliance of the technology or the conveniences it will bring us, but rather that it is a means of democratising our electrical energy supply in an environmentally sound way while giving us energy autonomy, which means real power to control our own lives in a direct and measurable way (kWh – measure of electrical energy).

Trinidad and Tobago’s electricity sector has some of the cheapest electricity in the world (6 US cents/kWh) as a result of natural gas reserves. This is an anomaly for the Caribbean region as other countries have high rates ranging from 30-50 US cents/kWh from having to import diesel/oil. Our cheap electricity has made it difficult for solar applications to penetrate our market without government intervention but unlike all other forms of energy, solar has the biggest potential for continual cost reduction that will eventually see it take root on our soil.

Ian Smart (MEngSci.) is an Instructor at UTT and CEO of Smart Energy Ltd- www.ttsmartenergy.com

The loan is for the Emerging Energy Latin America Fund II, the successor to a previous $25.2 million fund that was supported by the I.D.B.’s Multilateral Investment Fund.

“This financing is part of the I.D.B.’s commitment to develop mechanisms to support long-term funding of renewable energy and clean technology projects in the region, which stimulate innovation, job creation and green economic growth,” said Daniela Carrera-Marquis from the I.D.B.

Aside from renewable energy projects, the fund will invest in energy service companies using clean technologies such as waste management, biomass, energy efficiency and smart-grid projects.

The fund will be managed by Stamford, Connecticut-based Emerging Energy and Environment, L.L.C.

The eventual size of the new fund is set to be approximately $150 million, with the I.D.B. loan to be supplemented by contributions from local and international equity investors.

The Latin America and Caribbean regions are expected to see their energy demand increase by 75 percent by 2030. –

Source: IDB