Lennox OUDIT
Managing Director
TRIFACTOR TECHNICAL SALES AND SERVICES

Navigating a way forward for solar in Trinidad

Trinidad and Tobago

Lennox Oudit, managing director of Trifactor Technical Sales and Services, talks to The Energy Year about the main challenge with incorporating solar power in the Trinidadian market and how solar applications are benefitting petrochemicals facilities. Trifactor Technical Sales and Services provides construction and maintenance services to the oil and gas sector and sells sustainable products.

What is the main challenge with incorporating solar power in the Trinidadian market?
We were recently successful in carrying out four solar installations in various parts of Trinidad. We have completed them and are now waiting on the final commissioning of those projects.
T&TEC has nothing in place in order to commission them because they are grid-type projects and the legislation is not available for grid interconnection as yet. So there are some challenges in that regard.

How, then, do solar power installations currently benefit the residential market?
We have a couple of new products, such as an All-in-One system. Our market is more focused on off-grid systems due to the lack of legislation for grid interconnection. Off-grid systems are more suited for families who cannot afford to get a power supply from T&TEC to their residence or for farm communities where it’s difficult to get the power lines to the area. The All-in-One system allows us to put panels on the roofs of their houses and connect directly to them.
Aside from residential, we have done solar lighting installations for commercial and petrochemical facilities.

In what ways are solar power applications benefitting petrochemicals facilities?
The petrochemical companies are only doing lighting projects for structures that may be far from the plant and don’t need to run any power lines. They haven’t started integrating any major solar projects yet. We have discussed ways for some of them to reduce their carbon footprint by using our energy reduction equipment. For instance, we have equipment that reduces the power consumption of air conditioning units.
Based on the tests that we did, we found it was about a 48% reduction in power. A lot of the projects that we are doing right now are pilot projects that involve a study comparing power consumption between a month with the units on and a month with them off. We have done an installation at one of the petrochemical plants and we are now running the power consumption study with that facility.

Are there difficulties in incentivising more investments in solar power from the population?
The RIC [Regulated Industries Commission] has been reviewing the price of power, and it is going to change soon. If the price of power increases, then every resident has to pay additionally, so at that point there will be more economic reasons for people to start investing their money in solar installations.
The demand and interest are there, and the commercial sector is ready. But when we take into account that T&T has a grid system with no legislation for renewable energy feed, we have to add batteries and that is a significant extra cost.

Is it possible to get residential and commercial PV systems to feed back into the grid?
T&TEC will have to decide how they’re going to incorporate the micro grid into their system and balance it. It may require new equipment so they will have to do a significant amount of investment, but their current take-or-pay arrangement with existing power plants is costing them more money because they are paying for more than what is being used.
There is no benefit for them to encourage solar, other than if the government is pushing for that to happen.

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