The Grid is Full – Speaking at the launch of the USAID Caribbean Climate Investment Programme on September 14, 2023, the Minister of Energy Lisa Cummins acknowledged that Barbados had over 333 MW of renewable energy license applications, of which the Ministry has approved 205 MW of licenses. She also indicated that the grid could not “on board more than 100 MW” until other mitigation measures, such as energy storage, are implemented. Her comments were refreshingly candid for project owners and investors who have spent the last 10 months asking how much more renewable energy could be safely connected to the grid.
This capacity issue came to the fore in November 2022 when BLPC warned of emerging grid instabilities and notified project developers that new renewable energy projects – beyond the 100 MW current grid capacity limit – would only be connected if they included storage or agreed to be curtailed (i.e., periodically disconnected) at the request of BLPC. Additionally, a subsequent meeting with the FTC, BLPC, and the Ministry of Energy in January this year revealed that as of the end of December 2022, 73.5 MW of distributed capacity was grid connected with an additional 21.4 MW of capacity licensed but not built, bringing the total licensed and installed capacity to 95 MW. Since then, project owners and developers have been unsuccessful in being able to determine which projects can be connected without storage.
In the recent public filing notice of the Clean Energy Transition Rider (CETR) application, BLPC indicated that 89 MW of projects have already been connected to the grid with new connections growing at an average rate of around 2 MW per month year-to-date. At this rate, BREA can reasonably estimate that the grid will reach its physical capacity limit by the end of February 2024. New connections will be delayed thereafter until energy storage and other grid modernization investments are implemented.
The grid is, therefore, effectively full – for now. This is hugely disappointing for the remaining 105 MW of license holders (and many more license applicants) who now must wait indefinitely before completing their projects. The impact of these delays will reverberate through the industry. It will hurt some project owners more immediately than others. Some projects that are under construction may not be able to connect when expected. Other projects that are otherwise “shovel ready” (i.e., had all necessary approvals in hand) now cannot risk breaking ground. Projects that were still awaiting other approvals (e.g., Town and Country Planning) are now even further from the finish line than they expected. Not only will project owners suffer but so, too, will landlords who would have agreed to host projects, professionals who would have helped design them, and workers and suppliers who would have helped build them.