7 minute read
Interview - SKELEC
THE BACKBONE OF ST. KITTS
Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to Clement Williams, General Manager of the St. Kitts Electricity Company (SKELEC), about ongoing sustainable projects, dealing with climate change and delivering quality service.
By Daniel Baksi
The St. Kitts Electricity Company
(SKELEC) is a public utility provider on the island of St. Kitts, responsible for electric power generation, transmission, and distribution services. SKELEC originally existed as the government-run St. Kitts Electricity Department (SKED) as far back as the 1950s. At the time, power across St. Kitts was produced from a single internal combustion engine (ICE) plant, located on Central Street, in the capital city of Basseterre. “From the ICE plant, electricity was run overhead towards the Governor General residence at the time,” says Clement Williams, General Manager of the SKELEC. “There were one or two streetlights. Electricity was turned off at night, when there was no production and then it would start up again in the morning.”
On 1 August 2011, after assuming the resources and operations from government, SKELEC was officially formed. The company’s principal power station is located at Needsmust, and supplies electricity 24 hours per day to all areas on the island of St. Kitts. “Our penetration across the island is at about 98% of the population,” says Mr. Clement. “The current demand for electricity is roughly 24 megawatts, a slight decline from a peak of 28 megawatts pre COVID-19.”
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SWITCHING ON
SKELEC is currently working to implement the government’s renewable energy policy, calling for a rreduction in reliance on diesel in favor of greater integration of renewables into the country’s grid. “Sustainability has been a topic at the forefront of our mission for many years now,” says Mr. Williams. “One of our initial steps was to convert street lighting across St Kitts from the molecule mercury vapor bulb into new LEDs, a project that we carried out independently and in collaboration with the central government. When that’s completed by the end of this year, we’ll be reaping the benefits of those significant energy savings, and will have successfully eliminated mercury waste from our lighting system.”
One major renewable energy project has seen SKELEC partner with Swiss company Leclanché in the roll-out of a new solar farm. “It’s set to be a large utility-scale project, and one of the largest solar farms in the Caribbean at 30 megawatts, including significant battery storage equivalent to about 10 hours per day,” says Mr. Williams. “It’s going to be located on an area of land in the Basseterre Valley. At peak times, we expect to cover about 30% of our daily demand from that solar panel. We also have other long-term plans for the incorporation of wind energy, and we’re in discussion with our sister utility for the possibility of geothermal in Nevis, and perhaps interconnecting both islands. Beyond renewables, but with significant benefits in terms of reducing our carbon footprint, we’re evaluating the possibility of replacing some of our older fleets with newer-generation plants run on LNG.”
RESILIENT OPERATIONS
As a major public utility, SKELEC grapples with the increasing challenges of climate change, and the uptick in hurricanes to hit the Caribbean in recent decades. “We saw what happened with Irma and Maria in 2017, and then Dorian in the Bahamas,” says Mr. Williams. “We’re very susceptible to the effects of hurricanes. To that end, we’re currently upgrading one of our feeders to be more hurricane-resilient, working to put the backbone of our distribution system underground, which is about 40% complete as we speak. That will add to the 30% of the network that is already underground. We’ll then move on to two further significant feeders, each of which is primarily overhead.”
These improvements are essential to SKELEC’s service delivery. “It’s a matter of resilience,” says Mr. Williams. “It’s about using our best efforts to combat and counter the effects of climate change, respond-
ing to these increasingly strong hurricanes however we can. We pride ourselves on being a utility with a high reliability factor; these upgrades underline our commitment to continue to push forward.”
At the heart of these developments, and its broader operations, are the SKELEC staff. “Our team is small, capable and extremely talented, and we’re passionate about taking care of them,” says Mr. Williams. “We’re using every resource that we have available to us to increase our capacity. At the end of the day, it’s our number one priority: a utility is not a utility without the people it employs. We know that satisfied staff will in turn secure satisfied customers resulting in a supply that is reliable and affordable.”
A RENEWABLE FUTURE
“There’s a clear and definite trend taking place across the entire Caribbean, and the whole world, in which renewable energy is going to edge-out fossil fuels as the leading source of generation,” says Mr. Williams. “All over the world, we’re witnessing the emergence of solar PV, wind, alongside the transition from the heavier fossil fuels to the lighter, cleaner-burning fuels, like LNG. It’s no longer a thing of the future – already, we’re seeing these trends shape SKELEC as a utility, and the island of St. Kitts in general. Microgrids are now here to stay. The incorporation of PV charging stations for electric vehicles have arrived. We’re seeing a growth in distributed household generation. Our role is to respond to these trends, essentially modernizing the grid and making it more interactive, embracing available technology and finding a way to incorporate it at an affordable price. In this way, most of the population will be able to participate in, and benefit from, this renewable future, and we can maximize the financial benefits for everyone involved.”
“SKELEC already is the leading utility in the island of St. Kitts,” says Mr. Williams. “We plan to not only increase our visibility throughout the Caribbean, but we want to now rank among the leading utilities within the Caribbean. We are one of the smaller islands, but that doesn’t stop us from having big ambitions of being up there with JPS, LUCELEC, and the bigger Caribbean utilities.” c
