Dear Editor,
Your Development Watch columnist Tarron Khemraj correctly queried the Natural Resources Minister’s assertion that high energy cost is the key constraint in value-added manufacturing. High energy cost has always been a constraint since the 1973-74 OPEC intervention. Every manufacturer has to face it.
The problem is the government’s blinkered attitude towards the Amaila Falls Hydroelectric Project. Many knowledgeable persons have shown that the AFHP is far too expensive even for what we imagine we would be getting. I joined in and wrote some time ago that solar energy would be cheaper at our latitudes, and forecast that it would become still cheaper. And so it has. See the trend below where the price is in US$.
There are others more knowledgeable than I to delve into the facility of the government for making bad deals, so this opportunity is taken to say that I still encounter people who remember my claim. Some of them have actually started to go solar and it did not cost as much as it would have cost five years ago. It was most heartening, especially when a high school teacher told me that she is getting electricity from a solar panel and has plans for another panel when she can afford it. This lady is a long-serving CSEC Business teacher with frequent 100% pass rates with about 50 students every year. The government would do well to get a piece of her acumen.
Meanwhile, I have started a small energy services company (an ESCo) with a website www.thinkengineesco.com which is being developed to enable anybody, individual to corporate industrial, to be able to assess their energy, make it reliable, and use it more efficiently. Even that teacher might make technical mistakes of scale and compatibility which could compromise safety and efficiency. That is why the website has started with familiar household energy, and will deal with energy management.
It is possible to outfit a
comfortable city household to be almost forever independent of GPL, but it would cost about $4 million in solar energy investment. Careful energy management can deliver as much as 70% independence of the electric utility for only 20% of that investment cost, thereby putting solar energy within reach of more people. (Yes, I am aware ‘independence’ is mostly subjective and hence unquantifiable, but I do have experience of what some people have asked to be satisfied with.)
The investment cost would have been even lower if GPL had a grid-tie facility. I was pleased to hear they have tried such a system with the Guyana Energy Agency and that it can work, but I guess the present business plan does not allow for it. They are not alone, as this recent quote from the NY Times indicates: “Electric utility executives all over the world are watching nervously as technologies they once dismissed as irrelevant begin to threaten their long-established business plans.”
A solution to the apparent high energy costs to value added manufacturing can be found. It would involve a hybrid system of fossil fuel and solar power to accommodate the inductive power of many electric machines, and of course, good energy management.
Yours faithfully,
Alfred Bhulai
Energy technologist
