Mr. Roderick Gordon, Attorney-at-Law
The scale and investment in renewable energy worldwide have been staggering. Staggering when one thinks of the decades of fossil fuel dominance and dependence. Indeed, locomotion and static energy needs have been met almost exclusively by some form of generation that uses one form of fossil fuel or another, since man discovered the spark.
To be clear, there are two identifiable areas of renewable energy viability that Jamaica has identified. First, the use of ethanol (and eventually biodiesel) to substitute and conserve the use of imported petroleum. Second, the use of energy generated from renewable sources to supplement and hopefully retire some of the current generation from oil consuming units.
Both take significant investment and long term plans by private capital. Private investors, whether local or international, are primarily motivated by the rate of return on the capital employed. There has to be a plausible and definable path to this return in the medium to long term. Such expectation is not new to Jamaica, as historically a number of incentive programmes and laws have been passed to encourage nascent industries.
There is a peculiar urgency about the need for such incentive however. It is painfully clear to both government and private citizen, that fossil fuel costs will never return to a comfort zone that one can not be concerned about. The pain is felt daily, in virtually every sphere of activity, and is constant.
This urgency is made more acute by the aggressive amount and scope of specific laws passed in developed countries, as well as developing ones, to attract capital to invest in the development of a renewable energy industry. It is well documented that the world leaders in the solar and biofuel industries, such as Germany and Spain, achieved this status by the early passing of a Renewable Energy Sources Act (