TCI Moving to Catch Up in Clean Energy Race, attends CDB Conference  

By Dana Malcolm 

Staff writer 

#TurksandCaicos, March 24, 2023 – In an effort to speed up the transition to clean energy in member countries, the Caribbean Development Bank recently held the first CDB-Accelerated Sustainable Energy and Resilience Transition (ASERT-2030) Workshop, of which the Turks and Caicos Government was a part.  

It comes as the Turks and Caicos aims to catch up on its transition to renewable energy through the creation of a sound legislative framework. Clean energy percentage for the TCI, according to a CDB analysis has been very low so far.  

Delano Arthur, Energy and Utilities Commissioner and Dr. Eric Salamanca, Energy Analyst, represented the country in the two-day workshop which gathered energy sector stakeholders from across the region to develop assistance programmes.  

Those programs are designed to guide how the CDB and other partners will give support (likely monetary) to the borrowing members of the Bank, which includes the Turks and Caicos, to reach their sustainable energy goals. 

During the Caribbean Development Bank Meeting held in the Turks and Caicos in June 2022, sustainable energy specialist Christopher Straughn revealed that the region needed over $1 Billion in financing to reach its 2030 goals. 

At the time, The Turks and Caicos Islands, Anguilla, British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Grenada, Montserrat, St Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago were all doing extremely poorly on their sustainable energy transfer goals, clocking below 10 percent.  

ASERT is supposed to fix this by driving countries forward with both monetary support and providing technical road maps for them to hit their targets.  

TCIG says this first workshop referred to as the Regional Regulatory ASERT Dialogue (RR-Dialogue) focused on: 

• Agreeing on funding support strategies  
• Agreeing on a framework for planning, coordination and tracking the progress of the country’s regulatory readiness to support investments in renewable energy; 
• Shared lessons on challenges and solutions for regulatory reform in different countries. 

TCIG in a statement explained that its representatives made significant headway in establishing linkages for the country during the conference.  

“[They] established contacts with key stakeholders in the industry like the regulators in the region, CEO of regulatory bodies, the OOCUR, the World Bank, the IDB, the Caribbean Development Bank, the USAID, the EU, the Canadian Government, the CCREEE; among others,” it said.  

The Government has a renewable energy goal of releasing less than 500 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually.