Trinidad & Tobago’s Ministers of Energy and Planning have both reiterated the Government’s full commitment to the biggest solar electricity project in the Caribbean, dubbed Project Lara, despite delays in completing the final agreements with the project shareholders. Speaking at the Caribbean Sustainable Energy Conference, hosted by the Energy Chamber of Trinidad and Tobago, the Hon. Stuart Young, Minister of Energy, promised that the agreements would be “finalised, settled, signed and executed” by the end of February 2022 and the project would be up and running by 2023.
Project Lara is a joint venture comprised of multi-national energy giants bp and Shell, and specialist solar energy company Lightsource bp. The project will be constructed at two sites, one in Brechin Castle, near the Point Lisas industrial estate, and the other will be built in Orange Grove, near Trinicity. The two sites will have a combined capacity to generate a total of 112.2 mw of solar electricity, more than the total generating capacity of most islands in the Eastern Caribbean.
Nick Boyle, CEO of Lightsource bp also spoke at the conference, where he lauded the potential that solar offers to T&T. Boyle confirmed that once the project agreements were all finalised, construction will begin in 2022 and that the facility will be operational in 2023. Boyle expressed the view that there were two major benefits to solar in T&T, one is the obvious role it plays in decarbonization and participation in the energy transition but the second is that it also allows the country to increase its natural gas sales to the petrochemical sector and increase exports of both petrochemicals and LNG.
Many speakers at the Caribbean Sustainable Energy Conference highlighted the fact that there are significant opportunity for additional solar and other renewable energy projects in the country, which has a very different energy use profile to the rest of the region, given its well developed petrochemical, energy and heavy industrial sectors.
Minister Young made it clear that he hopes Project Lara will be the first of many solar projects in T&T. He revealed that the Ministry of Energy is already looking at the potential for floating solar projects in the sheltered waters of the Gulf of Paria and suggested that an RFP would be developed for the use of damaged quarry lands as possible locations for more of these solar projects.
The Minister of Planning, Hon Camille Robinson Regis, explained that T&T has an existing objective of producing thirty percent of its total electricity generation from renewable sources by 2030 and that further projects will be in the pipeline. She also committed to putting in place a feed-in tariff system to allow small-scale rooftop solar projects to connect to the grid, implemented by either individual householders or businesses.