‘REVISE IT’

By Shamar Blunt

Electricity consumer advocate and opposition lawmaker Senator Tricia Watson on Monday urged the Mia Mottley administration to scrap one of its major goals – a national grid powered entirely by renewable energy by 2030 – saying it would lead to unbearably high energy prices.

As the Senate debate began on the Appropriation Bill for the next fiscal year, Senator Watson declared that the granting of “hundreds” of licences to generate renewable power has made the grid unstable and there was no large-scale energy storage. She added that under the Clean Energy Transition Rider (CETR), where Barbados Light & Power Company (BLPC) is seeking to recover millions of dollars for its planned battery storage investments, citizens could end up paying $41 more on their monthly bills, in addition to the previously applied-for increase in basic electricity rates.

Given other multiple issues experienced over recent years with the electric grid, Senator Watson argued that the push for 100 per cent renewable energy, which has been one of the administration’s staunch economic policies since taking office in 2018, will result in unjust and unbearable rates.

“The 2030 target will kill us with high energy prices…full stop. Revise the target. We cannot do it; big countries, wealthy, talk about 50 per cent in 2050 whose populations can probably afford the cost of that transition. There is a cost to the transition and poor Barbadians cannot bear that cost,” said the attorney who specialised in utility regulation.

While acknowledging that she faced some criticism while serving as the first chair of the Electric Light and Power Advisory Committee, which was tasked with advising the government on licensing in its energy policy and legal and regulatory frameworks from 2015 to 2017, Senator Watson maintained that the committee understood the limitations of the grid at the time and only issued limited renewable energy licences due to its restricted capacity.

These limitations were something the Mottley administration failed to take into consideration when they took office in 2018, she charged.

“I hear it – ‘Oh, when we came all they had produced was 60-something licences…’ You want to know why the sector is in a mess? Because another couple hundred licences were issued without any care for whether the grid could accommodate the power,” she said.

“That is this government; bragging about it all the time – ‘how many megawatts, 200 and something and another 300’ – without any care, and ignoring the fact that the Barbados Light and Power sat down and ignored the need to upgrade the grid. If we are having problems with grid performance today, it is because of that. It is not because of RE [renewable energy], it is because they would not upgrade the feeders and transmitters and they would not upgrade the network, and now here we are.”

Watson added: “For people who want to criticise, when we said you have to be careful what you put on the grid, that conversation started when the Chief Town Planner then expressed concern about how much power was going on [to the grid] in Warrens, and no upgrades were being made to the grid to accommodate that power; that, too, is a fact.”

The opposition senator, who has also been an intervenor in the electricity rate hearing between BLPC and the Fair Trading Commission for the last two years, said that given the foresight of the Electric Light and Power Advisory Committee, the costs Barbadians will eventually be asked to cover in the name of energy transition were fair.

“The cost of the storage devices is just $557 million…. the rest of the $800 million are operation and maintenance costs that they are seeking to recover over the 10-year life of the batteries. Compare that to previous rate cases, where they sought to recover $325 million in 13 years, and Bajans were still feeling the effects of that increase,” she said.

“We are talking about a company that before Emera took over, used to retain 70 per cent, rounded down, of its earnings for reinvestment. Immediately upon the acquisition of Barbados Light and Power, that dividend ratio changed [to] 10 per cent retained on average. We could hear that it is everybody’s fault – except the Barbados Light and Power and the regulator who must have known something was not righteous – that we now have to face these high costs of transition.”

Watson also scolded Prime Minister Mia Mottley for what she regarded as her attempt, during her Budget speech the previous week, to press the FTC to give their decision on the CETR. The senator said that given the economic impact on Barbadians, such a decision must not be hurried.

shamarblunt@barbadostoday.bb