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Moving to net zero within a decade could transform the economy of Barbados.
Globally, government attitudes around decarbonisation have changed. No longer a ‘nice to have’ distant goal, it’s something every government must actively work towards. But if you are a small country with limited resources and an outdated energy system, how do you start moving towards net zero?
That was the question facing the island nation of Barbados in 2019, when its Ministry of Energy, Small Business and Entrepreneurship (MESBE) set an ambitious target for 100% renewable energy and carbon neutrality by 2030. With a clear ambition but no firm plan, the ministry drafted in Mott MacDonald to help come up with one.
“It’s transformational to go from what they currently have to where they want to be,” says Christian Kaufmann, a senior energy strategy and innovation consultant and our modelling team leader on the project. “And it involves a lot of stakeholders – across the transportation, tourism and agriculture industries, the end customers and so on.”
100%targeted renewable energy in Barbados by 2030
3%renewable energy use starting point
The scale of that transformation is apparent when looking at the country’s present energy mix. Barbados expects to consume 1277GWh of electrical energy by 2030, but most of its supply now is derived from imported fossil fuels. In 2019, oil accounted for 92% of primary energy use, with natural gas making up another 5% and renewables just 3%.
Given the volatility of the global oil market, the insecurity of supply, and the availability of new low-cost renewable energy technologies, the Barbados government understandably wants to change this mix. The question posed to us was “how?”
We began by talking to a variety of stakeholders in the Barbados energy and economic ecosystem, before collecting and processing data from a wide variety of sources. We then devised three proposals for how the country could transition to net zero within a decade.
It was a daunting task, but the prize for our client made it worthwhile, as Christian explains: “They’re currently generating carbon intensive electricity at a very high price. They have to import fuel, which is expensive, while at the same time having the vast indigenous renewable resources of a sunny, windy Caribbean island that they could easily tap into.
“There’s an opportunity for the country to move forward in a way that has economic potential, and this masterplan could set out the direction of travel for the next 10 years.”
That potential includes expansion of manufacturing through lower cost renewable power, agricultural diversification into biofuel crops, and the development of new, high-tech industries in renewables and energy storage. All this could create thousands of jobs and revolutionise the economy.
Our first step was to gather the data we’d need for our scenario modelling – and that meant talking to a huge range of stakeholders.
With funding from the Inter-American Development Bank, we worked for two years from May 2020 alongside the MESBE to develop what became known as the Integrated Resource and Resiliency Plan (IRRP). Our work included a diagnostic study of the resources and challenges facing the Barbados electricity market, facilitation of knowledge exchange between the ministry and key energy stakeholders, and the development of the plan itself.
One of the biggest initial challenges facing our team was to collect and analyse data of varying quality and depth, and from numerous sources. This included collating data from Barbados’ existing energy assets and making informed assumptions about future energy demand.
“This needed to be a data intensive exercise, but much of what we required was uncertain or unknown,” explains Christian, “so a part of this stakeholder engagement process was not only to get people’s views, but also to gather the best information we could possibly have to make the most informed decisions.
The work involved a diagnostic study of the resources and challenges facing the Barbados electricity market
“We needed to gather a lot of data, which is a challenge wherever you are. For example, in Western European countries it’s challenging because of the sheer volume of it, as well as the elements that are unknown. Even though Barbados is well developed, a lot of the data infrastructure isn’t yet there. It didn’t exist often enough in many places, or it wasn’t organised centrally, so it had to be collected from across a great many different parties.”
The data collection work did not just involve the relatively simple – though nonetheless resource intensive – job of analysing Barbados’ current assets in terms of power generation, distribution and transmission; it also involved us making medium- and long-term predictions about electricity demand.
A specific challenge was around predicting tourist demand, given the importance of the sector to Barbados’ economy. Our team analysed the carbon emissions of cruise liners, making predictions about how the frequency and length of their visits would change over the next decade and assessing whether there was scope to plug the ships into the electricity grid when they docked so they could be powered by locally generated renewable energy (see panel, ‘When the ships come in’).
We mapped three alternative pathways to decarbonisation. Each involved different levels of intervention and cost and – as our modelling showed – would produce different outcomes.
“The three scenarios offered different levels of integrating a number of renewable energy technologies into the system,” elaborates Tola Adeoye, who worked as project manager, and for whom the development of the IRRP was a key milestone in her career with Mott MacDonald. “We could quantify the effects these would have on, among other things, cumulative emissions, supply reliability, and electricity cost.”
The first pathway, called the ‘least cost plan’ (Sc1 LCP), is a baseline scenario with no major policy interventions, relying only on the competitive positioning of onshore solar PV and wind. The second, the ‘carbon cost internalised’ (Sc2 CO2), builds carbon pricing into the market cost mechanism to deter fossil fuel (see panel, ‘How does carbon pricing work’).
The third pathway, the ‘forced firm renewable scenario’ (Sc3 FRES), implements not only carbon pricing but also policies enforcing the use of renewables considered firm and dispatchable (as opposed to variable wind and solar), such as biomass, captured landfill gas and energy from waste, to improve resiliency.
88%minimum reduction in carbon emissions by 2030
To assess the impact of each scenario on Barbados’ ability to decarbonise its power supply, we undertook generation and transmission planning studies spanning 10 years, from 2021 to 2031. This established that while the baseline least cost plan could achieve an 88% reduction in annual carbon emissions by 2030, the carbon cost internalised scenario would reach 93.3% and the forced firm renewable scenario a 95% reduction.
Key results for three decarbonisation pathways for Barbados
None of the pathways achieve 100% decarbonisation by 2030. This is because back-up generation, which is still going to be needed, was found to be most economically provided by maintaining some level of existing flexible fossil fuel generators. To achieve further decarbonisation than the developed pathways would require increasingly higher cost premiums within the current IRRP.
“As expected, there is an optimal sweet spot for the level of renewable energy penetration, which to our surprise was much higher than expected as indicated already by the high outturn decarbonisation of the baseline least cost plan,” says Tola. “Then going beyond that with the other scenarios based on policy intervention ends up being slightly more expensive in terms of whole life system cost. That’s due to the decreasing marginal returns from relatively more expensive technologies that need to be deployed to achieve further reductions."
She explains that the impact of policy on cost and benefits at the margin needed to be carefully assessed. For example, weighing up the increased cost against the benefit of the intervention, which might significantly lower cumulative carbon emissions while offering increased resilience and wider economic sector participation that were major attractions for the stakeholders of our client.
To illustrate the delicate balance that must be struck by governments looking to decarbonise, the option offering the lowest cumulative emissions and the highest share of renewable integration – the forced firm renewable scenario – also has the highest levelised cost of energy of the three.
Carbon is not at present taxed in Barbados, unlike in Europe, and therefore is a classic externality, that is a cost that is not directly borne by market participants and therefore external to their decision making. The policy for dealing with such an externality is to internalise the cost through a price mechanism, such as a tax, or capping the volume of emissions, such as through a cap-and-trade scheme for emissions allowances, to encourage decarbonisation.
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