The Sixth Inaugural Meeting of the Trafalgar and environs Village Council comes at a time when the Government of Dominica is seeking to develop a geothermal project in the Roseau Valley and Prime Minister Hon. Roosevelt Skerrit in his address at Friday’s meeting defended Government's decision to develop the project.
He said, “We all pay light bills and, my God, there’s no way you can survive paying these light bills in this country when five or eight hundred dollars of your salary has to go to Domlec. How are you going to buy food with the balance…? How do we go about reducing the cost of our light bills for our citizens…? We were told that we should go to geothermal energy … we started geothermal; we had a study by OAS, no protest action… We had experts come here, we had studies done, we shared it with the public, was very transparent with it. Drilling was executed for the first, second and third test wells… no problem, no problem whatsoever. The moment the critics of the Government and the same environmentalists- the same people who told us that we should go to geothermal, saw that we were at the threshold of signing agreements with serious investors, credible investors to finally take advantage of that God-given resource, they started criticizing and saying that we should not go to geothermal. And interestingly enough, I’ve been told by some people that some of those people who are opposed to geothermal and are telling us that we should go back to hydro were previously against the hydro when the Freedom Party were doing the hydro here in the Valley… so what is it that you want?”
“If we were to talk about growth and development, if we were to talk about fighting poverty, if we were to discuss creating more jobs in the economy, we have to reduce the cost of energy in Dominica because ours is among the highest in the Caribbean,” he continued.
The Prime Minister discussed the alternatives to geothermal energy on the basis of economic sustainability.
“The hotels cannot run their plants fully [through energy provided by] Domlec because of the prohibitive cost of energy. You cannot have industries because you require energy to produce, we have DCP here for example and DCP had to take a deliberate decision to go to bunker fuel because if it had to rely on Domlec’s greed to survive, DCP would’ve been closed a long time ago… So how do we get more DCP’s, Bello’s, Papillotte’s and Fort Young’s in Dominica? It is by ensuring that we reduce through ethical and renewable means, the cost of energy to those people?”
The Prime Minister further stated that he welcomes concerns and questions from residents of the Roseau Valley area regarding geothermal energy.