New Solar Legislation Raises Concerns Among Industry Stakeholders

A new piece of law regarding solar energy is raising serious concerns among stakeholders in that sector, including the Belize Solar Industry Alliance.  Today, the BSIA brought forward several issues that it has with the solar legislation and argues that it flies in the face of Belize Electricity Limited’s mission statement.  News Five spoke with Jeremiah Allen, a member of the Belize Solar Industry Alliance.

 

Jeremiah Allen, Belize Solar Industry Alliance

“BEL’s mission statement is as follows, I want to read it for you, I think it’s a good place to start.  It says we deliver safe, reliable, sustainable energy solutions to enhance the quality of life and the productivity of enterprise and to support national development.  So BSIA feels like, that BEL and PUC’s new legislation that was just introduced isn’t achieving these goals, this mission, as well as it should be and we want to ask them to come back to the table, let’s negotiate the terms and move forward together. The current legislation, in its current form has several different issues, the biggest of which is just the economic proposition that it offers for the investors, whether they’re individual homeowners or industries and businesses who want to invest in solar there needs to be an economic incentive to do so and this legislation effectively discourages that. There are many Belizeans who have wanted to invest in solar but because of the uncertainties in an unregulated environment, they have held off for now.  With this new legislation discourages or disincentivizes investors in that the economics of it often don’t play very well to an investor.  The economic modeling often puts the return on investments into the ten-plus year range, depending on the system size.  Part of the difficulty is that calculating a return on the investment is very difficult because of the uncertainty of the fees associated under this new regulation. It’s been about nine months now since the PUC has opened up public discourse and we had been involved that entire time.  We have gone and we have voiced our opinions.  We have gone in private meetings and had off-the-record discussions and we feel like our voices are falling on deaf ears.  Our suggestions have not been heard and this is evidenced by the fact that nothing has changed from the draft legislation that we saw nine months ago to the legislation that was implemented last month. As part of Belize Solar Industry Alliance, there are twelve business organizations that have large installations who have in excess of three to five thousand kilowatt hours per day that they could be feeding into the grid right now but they’re not.  With the flick of a switch, they could be providing power into the grid, providing power for more than two hundred and fifty homes right here in Belize.  It’s available, it’s installed, they want to supply it.  All we need is a good regulatory framework which incentivizes that to happen.”