Will Guyana take advantage of these remarkable victories in sustainable energy generation?

Aug 02, 2021 Letters

Dear Editor,
Sustainable energy is set to become one of the most profitable and ubiquitous industries on the planet. The rate at which solutions are being developed, operationalized and scaled is mesmerizing. Breakthroughs in battery chemistries are occurring at breakneck speed. New innovations are being reported almost every day in the news.
In the United States, solar companies are laying down massive PV facilities and are now
starting to add storage units using the much-improved lithium-ion battery, now implementable at grid-scale. Across the seas in China and India, photovoltaic parks continue to exceed total capacities which are large enough to astonish.
Wärtsilä, the Finnish energy manufacturer with interest in Guyana, has come up with a software system for intelligently switching between intermittent power sources. Data from Wärtsilä showed that fossil-fuel generator usage was cut back by about 80% using this system. Wärtsilä has committed to the energy transition in providing this ‘hybrid grid’ since sustainable but intermittent sources like wind and solar cannot simply be hooked up to the existing unidirectional grid without the help of computers.
A contract was signed by the company in 2020 for the deployment of one such solution in the US Virgin Islands. The plant will use the dual-fuel engine that is soon to be deployed in Guyana. Advances in battery technology have unlocked a new way of thinking about the electrical grid.
The new paradigm is one in which electricity production is aggregated from the net-zero or self-sustaining home to collections of battery networks that form resilient layers at the neighbourhood, then town, then city and right up to the utility level. A software layer dubbed the Virtual Power Plant (VPP) is being conceived to redirect power intelligently from these battery networks which allow current to flow intelligently in either direction under varying conditions. In this new paradigm, consumption units are collected into aggregate layers that spill over or receive from layers above.
Small-scale hydro has stepped up its game in recent years, becoming affordable,
environmentally safe and easy to implement for communities of all income levels. ‘Turbulent’ turbines are producing electricity 24/7 for rural communities by safely redirecting streams and rivulets without blocking them or harming their aquatic life. Suriname has recently commissioned one such 15kW project. Kwakwani and Linden, areas that have struggled to achieve 24/7 power, come to mind.
Much of the rest of the world is seeing clearly and many are investing wisely. The cost
environment for all of these solutions has changed dramatically over the years. Will Guyana take advantage of these remarkable victories in energy generation and material science? Are power companies in Guyana aware of these resources? Will they act accordingly? Have intelligent investors in Guyana taken note?
Yours truly,
Emille Giddings

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Will Guyana take advantage of these remarkable victories in sustainable energy generation?

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