Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves expects that in three years time St Vincent and the Grenadines will be almost self-sufficient in electricity generated from its geothermal and hydro plants.
And it wants to sell some of that clean energy to Barbados.
Delivering the Faculty of Social Sciences’ 40th anniversary lecture at the Cave Hill Campus last night, the Vincentian leader said that with the help of the Canadian company Emera, which owns the Barbados Light & Power Company, his country hoped to be in a position to feed the energy here through undersea pipes.
“We have, depending on which experts you believe, between 150 and 300 megawatts of geothermal power underground,” said Gonsalves, whose Government has entered a partnership with Reykjavik Geothermal Ltd and Emera.
“They have a US$82 million project where we are going to build a 12 MW geothermal plant, so that by the end of 2018 . . . 80 per cent of our electricity is going to be generated by geothermal and hydro.”