Barbados lays out “ambitious but doable” renewables roadmap to 2030

Barbados is gearing up for big policy changes to enable renewable energy growth. The push towards making Barbados into a green energy nation in the next decade, took a major step today with the Prime Minister laying out an “ambitious” but “doable” road map to the 2030 goal, according to key observers who gave cautious support for the initiative.

She also set new milestones to 2030, declaring her intention to lift caps on the level of electricity from renewable sources in the national grid a mere week after they were announced, from the current 32.7 MW cap to 100 or 200 MW. 

She also announced her administration plans to quadruple the one megawatt total limit on the feed-in-tariff (FIT) through which individuals and companies provide electricity to the national grid from renewable sources. The announcement came one week after the FTC set the one-megawatt limit.

Declaring that she had enough time to reflect on the FTC’s recent decision on the feed-in-tariff, Mottley said: “A cap of [32.7] megawatts is miniscule in comparison to what we need to have in order to move this economy forward and to meet the sustainable goals that we are setting for 2030”.

She said: “It is against that background that the Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Consumer Affairs and Commerce that is responsible for the FTC (Financial Services Commission), and the FTC itself, must have an urgent consultation over the course of the next two weeks to be able to decide a few things.”

Last week, the FTC announced a FIT for renewable energy technologies up to one MW, granting individuals and businesses a combined maximum total capacity of 32.7 MW effective Monday, October 1 to December 31, 2021, or until that capacity was reached, whichever comes first.

The one-day conference, dubbed Roadmap to 2030, brought together key players in the energy industry to discuss a number of measures aimed at making Barbados 100 per cent renewable energy-dependent by the year 2030, and examine possible funding options.

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