Chairman’s speech - Caribbean Sustainable Energy Conference 2024
Collaboration for Action
10-12th June 2024
Hilton Trinidad
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to our annual Caribbean Sustainable Energy Conference. This is our annual event where we concentrate on decarbonization, renewables, energy efficiency, and all the policy and business activities towards ensuring that across the Caribbean, we have a more sustainable energy sector, with reduced emissions of greenhouse gases.
The just released IEA world energy investment report has shown that globally, investments into clean energy have continued to accelerate, and global spending on clean energy technologies and infrastructure is on track to hit the two trillion US dollar mark in 2024. However, this investment is very uneven and the spend is concentrated in China, Europe and the United States, with areas like the Caribbean lagging far behind.
While this surge in investment in clean energy is encouraging from a climate change perspective, we should be clear that achieving the objective of reducing greenhouse gas emissions does not mean abandoning our oil, gas and petrochemical industries. The same IEA report shows that there is over a trillion dollars of investment also going into fossil fuels globally.
Oil and gas is at the heart of three Caribbean economies, Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad & Tobago, and fossil fuels continue to be the primary source of energy in every country in the Caribbean, despite ambitious plans for introducing renewable energy. For the foreseeable future, the world will continue to need energy, and commodities produced from crude oil and natural gas, to provide affordable and secure heating, cooling, lighting and food for a growing global population.
But this certainly does not mean that it is business as usual – far from it!
While the Caribbean region has cumulatively generated only a tiny portion of the greenhouse gases that are driving human-induced climate change, we share international obligations under the UNFCCC, to contribute to the reduction in global emissions. And even if we did not have these obligations, the world is in the midst of a decades-long energy transition and that has serious implications for the way in which we all operate. Some of our trading partners are introducing trade policies that mean they will tax imports of key commodities based on their carbon intensity. Many investors and development banks have policies that restrict investing in - or lending to - fossil fuel projects. And increasingly, our own people are demanding that we take climate change seriously and both reduce emissions and plan how we adapt to a warming world. Scientific evidence indicates that the world needs to rapidly accelerate the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions if we are to limit human-induced climate change to manageable levels.
In Trinidad and Tobago, reducing the carbon intensity of our energy and industrial sectors needs to be a top priority, in order to ensure their long-term viability. Given our well-developed industrial sector, it makes sense for us to concentrate on the energy and industrial sectors in this conference. Renewable energy tends to get the headlines when people are discussing the decarbonization of energy systems and of course, renewable technologies like wind, solar and geothermal have a huge role to play and are a key element of our discussions at this event. However, in an industrialised economy like ours, we also need to focus on things like methane reduction, carbon capture and sequestration, the role of natural gas, and low carbon hydrogen. And energy efficiency is important for every economy, whether dependent on heavy industry or tourism, though it somehow often gets missed in the conversation. In this conference, over the next two days, and on our tour to the TGU power generation facility on the third day, we will be covering all these areas and more.
Change is always difficult and there are certainly many challenges that we face as we take action to decarbonize our economies. Collaboration between different stakeholders is essential to overcome these challenges. This includes collaboration between different companies, between the private sector and the government, between countries, between academia and industry and with and among different civil society organizations.
Collaboration is important, but it is also often difficult. There is often a lack of trust between different stakeholders that limits their ability to collaborate. Some environmentalists will inevitably look at this conference and distrust the intentions of the Energy Chamber and our sponsor companies – the accusation of “greenwashing” is one that gets easily thrown around. Building trust is difficult and it only comes when people commit to dialogue and engagement. Conferences like this one are important to the process of building trust and dialogue and to improving the understanding of other stakeholders’ positions and strategies.
Transparency is also extremely important to the process of building trust. In the energy sector, we’ve seen how initiatives such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative - or EITI – have helped to build trust between different stakeholders through the process of reporting and verifying revenue collected by the State from the sector. It is important that we have systems of independent reporting and verification within the realm of emissions reductions to also build that trust. Academia and NGOs have an important role to play in this regard, as does the media, to make sure that highly technical data about emissions is communicated in a manner that the public understands and trusts. Building trust will help with collaboration, but we also need collaboration to build trust.
While the process of decarbonizing our energy sector includes many serious challenges, it also presents many significant opportunities for new business development. The renewables and energy efficiency sectors provide opportunities for smaller scale investments and opportunities for our smaller energy service companies. In some Caribbean countries, notably Barbados, we have already seen a lot of investments being made into small scale solar installations and we will hear further information about that tomorrow. There are also lots of opportunities for smaller companies to be involved in energy efficiency projects, especially in the commercial and residential sectors, for cooling, an issue that is becoming more important as ambient temperatures increase and hence the demand for electricity for air conditioning also increases.
While there are business opportunities for smaller private-sector companies as we decarbonize, we do need to have the right regulatory and policy environment in place. In Trinidad and Tobago, for example, we need to get the regulatory and legal changes introduced in our electricity sector to allow investments in small-scale solar rooftop installations. There is significant scope to bring distributed electricity generation onto the grid and this represents an excellent opportunity to unlock capital from the private sector. However, we know that this also needs careful planning, as the electricity grid needs to be optimized to ensure that this source of electricity can be delivered. Again, this speaks to the necessity of collaboration.
Business associations, such as the Energy Chamber, have an important role to play in fostering collaboration between different players within the sector. Our membership spans the full range, from major multinational energy companies to small local service companies, so we are very aware of the challenge of fostering dialogue and building collaboration. We also interact frequently with many state agencies and with colleagues in the private sector throughout the Caribbean and beyond.
The Caribbean Energy Chamber is an important vehicle for building communication and collaboration across the region and the Energy Chamber of Trinidad & Tobago has been pleased to join as one of the founding members. We anticipate that this new Chamber will complement the work that we have already been doing on building a regional network of stakeholders.
One thing that the Energy Chamber has found over the years is that open communication is key to building trust and collaboration. There are countless communication channels that we all now have at our disposal, but nothing is better than meeting in-person, sometimes one-on-one, and talking through the issues. We know that casual conversations during breaks and networking sessions are extremely important at events like this one, and we encourage everyone to engage with as many people as possible, not just the people you know already.
So in closing, as Chairman and on behalf of the Board, Management and Staff of the Energy Chamber, I wish you all a productive and enjoyable conference over the next couple of days.
Thank you.