The Jamaica Gleaner reports that Jamaica has just received a $30 Million under the US Clean Energy Finance Facility, to pay for legal, consultancy and engineering costs for a new renewables project.
Jamaica Gets First Grant Under US Clean Energy Finance Facility
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has awarded the first grant through the Clean Energy Finance Facility for the Caribbean and Central America (CEFF-CCA), to help develop a 37 megawatt solar farm in Westmoreland.
CEFF-CCA will provide support to Rekamniar Capital Limited, the project developer, to partner with independent power producer Neoen on forming the Eight Rivers Energy Company, which will build the solar facility, according to a release from the US embassy in Kingston.
The purpose of the grant is to support selected legal, consulting and engineering costs in late stage project development, it said.
…
US President Barack Obama launched CEFF-CCA on April 9, 2015. The programme seeks to encourage private sector investment in clean-energy projects in the Caribbean and Central America.
…
Does anyone think this $30 million grant to assist the Jamaican renewables legal process will deliver any value to the Jamaican people, other than a few well connected bureaucrats? But cancelling the grant will stir up diplomatic trouble for President Trump. Diplomatic trouble with Jamaica could impede joint efforts to stamp out drug smuggling into the USA.
I’ve just read http://www.pv-tech.org/news/jamaican-government-selects-eight-rivers-to-build-33.1mw-solar-plant and now I’m puzzled. “The construction of the PV plant at Paradise Park is set to begin in July”, that’s July 2016. “EREC has designs to start operating what will be Jamaica’s largest solar energy plant within a year” of May 2016. By now, construction was supposed to have been underway for at least 5 months. Late phase? I’ll say!
http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/business/20160511/our-selects-eight-rivers-renewable-project also says 33.1 MW and quotes Angella Rainford of Rekamniar as saying “I hope to have this project operational within a year” of May 2016.
Neither article suggested that the project was underfinanced.
https://blog.iiicorp.com/2016/08/12/eight-rivers-energy-fine-tuning-ppa-for-50mw-solar-plant-before-issuing-rfp-for-epc-and-locking-in-financing/ left me even MORE puzzled. That article says the “gross capacity” is 49.5 MW. Notably, it *also* says (and this was just a little over 4 months ago) that the cost of the project was “USD 50m” and that the partner companies were even then “locking in the debt component of its project finance”.
Somehow between May and August “operational within a year” had turned into “The construction period is projected to last nine to 10 months, but the developer is budgeting a year conservatively, Rainford said, noting the project is expected to be online by the end of 2018.” (which is two years from now).
The more I read about this the less I know!
One thing does seem to be becoming clear. The European companies that formed Eight Rivers will OWN the plant; the agreement they have with the Jamaica is not an agreement to build a plant for Jamaica but an agreement to supply electricity. Whatever funding the US provides (and at a total cost of USD 50 million, they shouldn’t need anything even close to USD 30 million), it will be awarded to *European* companies to produce an asset for said *European* companies.
I never in my life thought I would ever say anything like this. Arrgh.
This is what neocolonialism looks like.
The 3rd-world country gets dearer and intermittent electricity.
The US gets influence, and the EU gets money.
Aren’t liberals supposed to be AGAINST neocolonialism?
“anything even close to USD 30 million”
Did you find anywhere in your research that they would be getting $30M?
With respects, Nick, you seem focused on the “$30M”. (Yes, it would be good to nail the actual figure down.) But if it was $30M or $10M or a dime, it’s a dime to much … and wasted to boot.
(Kind’a like donating to a “charity” that uses 50+% of the donations on “administrative cost”.)
A couple of hours ago I wrote about this issue — after searching for 1/2 hour to find some numbers. That was a waste of time.
I made the mistake of writing that note here using WordPress. Upon clicking on “Post Comment” my brilliant composition disappeared into the luminiferous aether.
Nevertheless,
Happy New Year.
Well, this site seems to say that “over” $10M is the total funding for the CEFF-CCA scheme, for all Carib/Central America.
No I didn’t, which is why I made it clear that I doubt that figure.
Let me say it even more plainly: the ONLY link I can find between CEFF-CCA, Jamaica, and thirty million is this article and various clones of it.
https://www.ustda.gov/program/regions/latin-america-and-caribbean says that the US is helping
to pay for LED street lighting in Jamaica. The official press release about the solar project is currently at
https://jm.usembassy.gov/category/environment/
and says nothing whatever about how much money is involved.
I have no idea where the $30 million figure came from, and after searching around, I do not believe that that much money has actually been allocated for this project under CEFF-CCA. In fact I found this at
http://www.ceff-cca.org/about.html
“CEFF-CCA intends to provide $10 million in grant funds to address an urgent need to enhance energy security and lower energy costs in both regions, as more reliable and less costly energy is a critical factor for both regions’ economic prosperity and competitiveness.” That is, in June 2016, the TOTAL for ALL energy projects in both the Caribbean and Central American was ten million. Not thirty million in Jamaica.
That site goes on to say that “CEFF-CCA grants will provide targeted assistance to help promising but undercapitalized renewable energy and energy efficiency projects address core technical, business/financing strategy, structuring and modeling, and other feasibility questions in order to enable them to reach financial close.” So the entire CEFF-CCA thing is set up to provide undercapitalized (which this project was not supposed to be) projects in the planning phase (which this project was not supposed to be in any more), not construction or operation. CEFF-CCA are doing the kind of thing they said they would do.
Now it does seem from the articles I cited earlier that the project MAY be slipping, so it MAY be in trouble, and if the time planning was wrong, the money planning might be wrong, and it MIGHT be the case that the budget has blown out quite a bit, which would be the reverse of surprising, so Eight Rivers MIGHT want thirty million. More time searching that I can really justify has failed to turn up any evidence that they have asked for it or are getting it. Since CEFF-CCA had planned on $10 million for several countries, even if CEFF-CCA’s budget had been tripled I don’t think one project in Jamaica would get all of it.
Yes, I’m not sure where the $30M comes from…and I’m not sure if the $10M-ish cap is annual or a one-time bankroll.
But I have a model that says it will be $30M.
The numbers or accurate reporting are completely irrelevant. In these days of post truth and a reliance on false news nothing is true but everything is possible. You just pick the tale that rhymes with your political beliefs and give it legs.
Richard –
You seem to have provided the only rational comments to this post. Thanks for your efforts. You saved me a lot of time. My take on this USAID project is that they provided something like a line of credit, available until March 2017, to a British company and a French company to pay for certain aspects of the project. Looks like the actual money is probably way under $10M.
Well, it seems I didn’t “follow the money” far enough. The USAID site about CEFF- CCA has a section entilted “ About the Implementer “ which says:
“ECODIT LLC is an international development firm working with governments, businesses, and local communities to advance environmentally- and socially-responsible development around the world…..ECODIT has two permanent offices: one in Washington, D.C. and one in Beirut, Lebanon.”
See: http://www.ceff-cca.org/about.html
According to a website listing government contracts .USAID has contract with Ecodit LLC, to do the work for the CEFF-CCA. The total contract is for $11.9 million.
Part of the contract description says:
“Assistance will be provided through grants that allow project developers to carry out legal, technical, engineering and other studies they need to be able to bring their project to bankable status.”
See: https://govtribe.com/contract/award/aidoaai1300016-aidoaato1600001
So it appears that the money (however much it is) will not leave the U.S, but go to a Washington, D.C. area consulting firm. I tried to find something about how much the Jamaican project was for, but was unsuccessful.
Now in Canada our Prime Minister who is forcing a carbon tax on Canada is on holiday in some warm climate and his location is a secret. So a carbon tax for the peons its okay for him to leave a carbon trail to some secret location. maybe Cuba as he was an admirer of Fidel. Ottawa being some what cold this time of year I guess global warming cannot happen fast enough for him.
It is to laugh.
By some accounts the Bill+Hillary+Chelsea Clinton Foundation, Bon Ki Moon and a not so small contingent of “UN Peace Keeper Troops” from Nepal who carry the Cholera virus caused the sickening of 800,000 and death of 9,000 Haitians.
Guess Big O wants to “up the ante” for his world conquest after he leaves the USA.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/16/ban-ki-moon-speaks-out-after-desperate-haitians-loot-un-aid-truc/
http://www.ijdh.org/2016/12/topics/health/u-n-finally-apologizes-for-cholera-in-haiti-but-omits-one-point/
Typical of Bon being a half-breed Korean-Japanese he gave a “half-apology” according to Phillip Alston, U.N. Human Rights Special Rapporteur.
“But he stopped short of apologizing for the fact that the bacteria was brought to the island by Nepalese peacekeepers and flowed out of toilets from their base in to a local water supply.
For that reason, Philip Alston, the U.N.’s human rights special rapporteur, told The Guardian that Ban Ki-moon had made a ‘half-apology’.” — ijdh.org
With free cash like this floating around, Al Gore is sure to be found!
It is to laugh.
Nitpick: the cholera pathogen is a bacterium, Vibrio cholerae, not a virus.
The good thing is that Obama is gone soon. The Republicans control Congress and Trump will be able to do what he needs to do with a little compromise here and there.
The world will change just like it did when Thatcher and Reagan rose to power. Eventually, communism fell, monetary policy moved to the modern age and has never looked back since. The next steps are to get rid of left-wing populism and politically-correct emotional and shame-based programs.
When the ordinary people begin to realize how this “works better in the real-world”, the tide will turn finally. Green power just needs to have the financials exposed. Twice the cost really. People know what twice the cost means. Especially when it only lasts 25% as long.
Obama and his rubber stamp congresses have saddled the US with ten trillion more in debt, doubling the national debt in ten years, even with indebtedness already ballooned by war and bank bail out under Bush, who had to deal with the 2008 financial crisis created by Clinton, Rubin, Dodd, Frank and in part GOP members of congress in 1998. Repeal of Glass-Steagal (prohibiting investment banks from lending for mortgages) was the GOP contribution, but that on its own wouldn’t have mattered much without the subprime slime insisted upon by Democrats.
It will be hard to grow enough to finance such crushing debt, which is why “economists” like Krugman want inflation. The only alternative is default, whatever that would look like for the world’s reserve currency. Most other countries are in almost as bad to worse condition, so that there is a race to debase currencies.
I think there is a cap of 5% of construction costs or $1M. I think the $30M came from some bad math or a mixup between $ and MW.
Hmmm….Clicked on Kingston weather at the top of the Jamaica-Gleaner article.
84oF (28oC)
Feels like 90oF (32oC)
Wind Chill: 84oF
Why does the USA have to stick it’s beak, or cash in this case, in other countries affairs .
Take a look at the ghettos in Chicago , Detroit etc etc . Obama doubles the national debt and
then sends $billions into never never land to be completely wasted when it could of helped at home .
If your basically bankrupt you don’t pay other peoples credit cards with what’s left of your credit .
As I already said Amber, it’s better than bombing them. And btw that runs into trillions.
Evidence, where are the bodies?
Tony
Talk of bombing is the same as resorting to comparisons with Hit1er and the Na3 is. It amounts to admission that you’ve lost the argument, according to Godwin’s law.
In any case Trump will likely do a lot less of it than his predecessor O’bomber.
“It’s better than bombing them.”
Why would we want to bomb Chicago and Detroit???
The socialist democrats have already thoroughly destroyed those two cities!
“J Mac January 2, 2017 at 4:43 pm”
I see what you did there, clever!
The “power-worry” – a political skill of increasing importance, demonstrated skillfully here by senator Christine Todd Whitman
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38484730
“I worry terribly about the future of our families and children …”
Note the nervously splayed fingers and the affectatious grimace of benevolent apprehension. This is a true master of the power-worry.
It is a contest after all to see who can give away the most taxpayer money. Besides, you never know when you might want to ask a favor in return later for a Presidential Library or foundation or beach resort house etc etc etc.