Rays and the Cay

CHUB CAY

CHRIS RABIL

BURNING SUNSHINE

BY FRED GARTH

If nothing else, history is sprinkled with irony. How’s this? A Texas businessman makes his fortune in the oil and gas industry, then goes on to build one of the most advanced solar energy systems on the planet.

Regardless of your views on global warming, or even if you think aliens live among us, one thing is certain — solar power has become good business. This is especially true in remote tropical outposts where big fish roam and electricity is produced by burning expensive diesel fuel.

“We were going through 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel every day to power our resort,” said David Renaud, general manager of Chub Cay Resort in the Bahamas. “At $5 to $6 dollars per gallon, that’s a massive expense.”

Chub Cay is your typical postcardperfect, blue-water, beach paradise. The five-mile-long island anchors the south end of the Berry Island chain and sits about 20 miles north of Andros. Chub is famous in the fishing world for being adjacent to the Tongue of the Ocean and on the doorstep of The Pocket, a deep water geological formation that is home to an incredibly diverse lineup of sea critters including marlin, dorado, tuna, sailfish, sharks … you name it. The resort is a longtime favorite hangout of the rich and famous, yet it has gone through numerous owners and iterations since the 1970s. In 2014, George Bishop — that aforementioned businessman — bought the entire island. In some ways, he inherited a beautiful nightmare. “The resort had been languishing in receivership, so it was basically in a state of disrepair,” Renaud said. “We were facing myriad problems, and, on top of everything, we couldn’t even get vegetables to grow in our garden. That was kind of depressing.” In addition to getting the resort shipshape, part of Renaud’s mission was to investigate alternative forms of energy

such as wind and solar power. Not only was diesel a crippling expense, but just keeping the massive generators running was a royal pain. There was the engine oil and filters that had to be changed regularly then disposed of safely, plus the constant threat of mechanical failures, as well as getting parts shipped to a remote location. Just the process of offloading all of that diesel fuel from the boat to the dock to the generator took loads of manpower and time. Pile on the carbon monoxide fumes spewing into the atmosphere 24/7, and it all seems a bit archaic.

Renaud and his team spent an entire year researching alternative fuel options. After many hours and stacks of spreadsheets, he eventually landed on a plan to build a solar farm that could provide power to the entire island. The cost for the microgrid: $12 million. That sounds like a lot of money until you consider the fuel and labor savings, which Renaud predicted would recover that investment in four to five years. Resort owners smile on sound money management like that.

In 2021, the project was built on 8 acres of unused land with 7,600 bifacial panels that can absorb sunlight on both sides; even light reflecting off of the ground gets sucked into the system. The crown jewel is a bank of lithium ion batteries that, in itself, cost $2 million and provides 10 megawatt-hours of storage. The 13.8-kilobyte system pumps out enough energy for the 104 local residents (in a 64-home staff village) as well as 180 hotel rooms, 70 private homes and the 110-boatslip marina.

“We had a number of different companies bidding on the project,” Renaud said. “Ultimately, we went with a Bahamian company because we wanted to employ a local business and local people. To build the project, the workforce was 90% to 95% Bahamians. Now, the solar facility is providing hightech jobs for a lot of local people who can use those skills in the future.”

These days, it’s fairly common for resorts in far-flung corners of the world to employ solar and/or wind. In this case, Renaud and the system designers changed the game around somewhat. Instead of just sending the solar energy into the batteries to run everything, their microgrid powers up the island’s grid.

“It makes more sense to send power to the grid during the day when the sun is churning out energy,” Renaud said. “When we have excess energy, that is, when we are producing more power than is being used at that moment, that electricity feeds into the batteries.”

When the sun goes down and the panels shut down, the island runs off the battery system. If the battery gets low, the diesel generators kick in as a backup. The generators may sit dormant for several days or they may run a few hours per day depending on a variety of factors such as cloud cover or overall electricity usage. The bottom line is that diesel fuel consumption has dropped by 90%, which translates into more than $1.5 million dollars per year in fuel savings — and dramatically less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“The beautiful part is that the system is totally automated,” Renaud said. “The software manages the grid for us, so it’s totally hands-off. The technology is borderline Star Wars. Plus, there’s tremendous interest from the Bahamian government, which is studying the microgrid to copy on other islands.”

The initiative won the North and South American Solar Project of the Year Award partly because of the innovative way they configured the solar panelgrid-battery relationship. In addition to being able to power the whole island,

the setup also has the potential to triple the life of the batteries from a typical five years to as many as 15 years. With the major expense of the battery bank, that’s a game changer. “If we can get that extended life out of the battery, it brings our cost to as low as 5 to 7 cents per kilowatt-hour.” (It costs about 40 cents per kilowatthour to produce electricity using dieselpowered generators.) “The reduced cost of electricity allows us to sell that power to our customers for a fair price.”

Wait, what? Did he say “sell”?

Yes, he did. The Chub Cay Resort is no longer just a beach playground and marina. Now, it’s also a utility company — a green utility that is. Instead of the homeowners and the yachts in the marina running on diesel-generated electricity, they’re running on sunlight. It should be noted that the local workers who live in the staff village pay no rent or water fees and, of course, electricity is free.

“The fuel savings is amazing but it’s really just a small part of the story,” Renaud said. “We’ve transformed from fossil fuels to solar, which is even more impressive when you consider that Mr. Bishop has been an oil man for most of his career. Both he and the resort have changed with the times. The greatest part is that the resort wins, our customers win, the oceans win and the planet wins.”

The resort is blazing a path for others in the Bahamas to follow. Since most of the electricity in the island nation is still produced by expensive diesel, it’s not uncommon for local people to pay as much as $1,000 per month for power for a modest 1,200-square-foot home. Many times, their power bill is higher than their rent, and families do their best to save electricity by only using their air conditioning for a couple of hours in the morning and a couple at night.

Now, on Chub Cay at least, the winds of change are blowing.

“What we’ve done is not only good for the environment,” Renaud said, “but great for our checkbook and the local islanders. We like to say that we burn sunshine on Chub.”

In case you were wondering, they’ve even gotten the garden growing.

“We were trying everything to get the vegetables to grow, and our engineer kept telling us that the water was just wet,” Renaud said. “I told him I knew that water was wet but what did he mean?”

It turns out that the reverse osmosis water makers that desalinate seawater into drinking water were also stripping out all of the minerals, so there were no nutrients to help the plants to grow. As the engineer said, it was just wet. They decided to mix in some grey water from the resort and the next thing you know, the garden took off.

“We’re growing watermelons that look like they came from Jurassic Park,” Renaud said with a chuckle. “Now our garden supplies 20% of the vegetables for the resort.”

With more than 700 islands in the Bahamas and thousands more scattered around the planet’s sun-drenched tropical belt, moving away from the era of fossil fuels is the only sensible solution. Chub Cay has proven that it’s not the wave of the future. It’s happening right now. “The greatest part is that the resort wins, our customers win, the oceans wins and the planet wins.” David Renaud, General Manager, Chub Cay Resort