The recent statements made by our Electricity Corporation managers, explaining the ever increasing frequency of outages in our territory have not gone down well with consumers. The people are suffering from loss of business, loss of inventory, loss of sensitive electronic equipment to inability to even take a shower at the end of a hard day’s work. All of these complaints stem from the inability of our Electricity Corp. to consistently maintain the electricity supply. To make matters worse, the consumers have witnessed almost a doubling of their electricity bills although the service remains so erratic.

The management of the Electricity Corp. attempted to explain some of the reasons for the current state of affairs by giving us a diatribe of technical jargon which most of us lay people do not understand. By my interpretation, the bottom line is, our Electricity Corp. does not have the generating capacity to maintain a constant supply of electricity to the territory. If they only have the ability to generate 39Megamatts of electricity and the BVI currently uses 30Megamatts of electricity, they have a serious problem. It means that if one or two of the generating units go down, for whatever reason, there will be load shedding approximating what we are now experiencing.

One would wonder where was the planning to ensure more than adequate generating capacity was made available when units are rotated out of service, as they tried to explain. Is a mere 9Megawatts excess capacity sufficient for our needs? Why is the Long Bush power station still out of commission?

The real issue at hand, though, is people are questioning why their electricity bills are suddenly nearly double what they used to be. Our Electricity Corp. has not given an adequate explanation for this. The people are rightly pointing out that our elected representatives are all silent on this issue.

Let me attempt to make a few suggestions:-

Our Electricity Corp. needs to boost their generating capacity to a level that will sustain our needs even in event of acts of nature or loss of capacity through maintenance issues. We do not necessarily need to increase the capacity by installing more diesel engines. We should research the possibility of installing large wind turbines which I understand generate about 3Megawatts of electricity each. We only need ten of them to generate all our needs right now. I would imagine that these turbines are expensive, but we could afford to install one per year. I also know that these turbines can be installed out in the ocean so that they are not distracting to the natural beauty of our islands. We can utilize the energy of the ocean waves by installing power generating buoys. These are large buoys that sit on the ocean one mile or two offshore and they generate electricity by transforming the up and down motion of the waves into electricity. This technology already exists.

I call on our elected representatives to introduce a bill in our House of Assembly to allow our people to install solar generating electricity in their homes. I made the decision 4 years ago to install solar in my house and now I generate 90% of my electricity needs from the sun. My electricity bills average about $100 per month for a five bedroom home. Installing solar in your home is not cheap. It cost me nearly $30,000 but the system has almost paid for itself over the years. Our representatives can legislate rescinding customs duty on imported solar components and even offer a rebate or tax deduction for those individuals choosing to solar power their homes or businesses. This would reduce the cost of installation by half. This measure would also reduce the generating capacity needed by our Electricity Corp.

With the price of fuel continuing to increase with the likelihood that it will continue to rise in the future, we need to seek the alternative forms of generating electricity in a clean, environmentally friendly manner. Let us make the BVI a model of how to make a tiny Territory energy independent.

Dr. Hubert O’Neal.

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