Cabinet approves BPTT/Shell renewables consortium

THE PRIME MINISTER on Thursday confirmed that Cabinet has given a BPTT-Shell consortium the green light to go ahead with its proposal for a renewable energy project.

"Just today Cabinet took a decision to continue with our renewable energy initiative. We came to the point where two companies BP and Shell won the proposal and Cabinet agreed that we should advance to that,” Dr Rowley said at the post-Cabinet media briefing at the Diplomatic Centre in St Ann’s.

The next step, the Prime Minister said, will be that the companies will now negotiate a power purchase agreement (PPA), which must come back to Cabinet for approval. “And then we will be aiming to produce 130 megawatts of power from renewables,” he said.

This is the government’s first confirmation of reports late last year that the consortium (the third party is British renewables company LightSource, which is partly owned by BP) won the Ministry of Energy’s request for proposals (RFP). The RPF was issued in December 2018, as a follow-up to the Ministry’s first call for expressions of interest in June that year.

The RFPs are for both solar and wind projects, supplying up to 130 megawatts of electricity generation from renewables on a build, own, operate basis. That electricity will be part of the National Grid.

The Government has previously announced a target of ten per cent of the nation’s electricity from renewables by 2021.

The Prime Minister made his announcement in the context of a unitisation (consolidation) agreement between TT and Barbados for possible natural gas development and production.

Barbados recently signed an exploration agreement with BHP, the company that also has the licences for TT’s deepwater blocks near to the maritime border with Barbados.

Despite the hydrocarbon thrust, Rowley said both countries were focused on including renewable sources of energy in their plans for greater sustainability and development.