In an environment of serious difficult economic times and the continuing hardship faced by Montserratian residents, with a sky rocketing cost of living, the Hon. Donaldson Romeo asked Premier Reuben Meade at the first sitting of the Legislative Assembly on January 22, “Is there anything the government of Montserrat can do to decrease the cost of diesel, petrol and cooking gas?”
The government as part of their drive to increase revenue, while increasing the tariff last year on several imports to Montserrat, had also increased the tariff on petrol, driving the cost to nearly $19.00 at the gasoline pumps and of course the fuel surcharge on the electricity bill. The response was different from the Premier’s previous response at an press briefing last year when it was suggested to him that lowering the tariff would ease the burden on vehicle owners at the pump. At the time he said there was nothing he would or could do to satisfy the suggestion.
Responding to the LAM The Premier’s answer was, “Yes. But there are consequences which can impact negatively on government budget and the services it is required to provide.”
DFID is hiding a document that is showing Diesel power will be used every day with Montserrat geothermal power
How could Montserrat geothermal power be a game changer when DFID want 65% of the net profit for their private investors?
How could Montserrat geothermal power be a game changer when the government 35% will be going towards paying back the loan to The Caribbean Development Bank for the Diesel power station?
How could Montserrat geothermal power be a game changer when Diesel power will be used everyday at peak load?
How could Montserrat geothermal power be a game changer when the consumers will still have a fuel surcharge on their electric bill?
How could Montserrat geothermal power be a game changer and the government will still have to pay for street lights and other electricity they consume
We know the problems
We know there is a problem that geothermal turbines must not vary between base load and peak load so for DFID to be installing geothermal power for the base load and use diesel power for peak load is not good, it can be done without using Diesel power for peak load
The solution
If they are using the steam driven geothermal system the solution is to install more geothermal power than we need and install a governing device to induce an electric load on the turbine so the turbine will have the required load switched manually or automatically between the consumer load and the governing load and still maintain the required load on the turbine.
It happen before, people were told to leave the lights on in their home when they go to work so it can keep the load on the turbine
The load problem can be solved in many ways for example the binary system can be piston or turbine driven and the load problem can not affect the piston type binary system so by using one piston type module with the other turbines would solve the problem
We have lots of internal combustion engines that we can convert for the binary geothermal system that the high and low load would not affect the piston type geothermal system.
We already have pipes in the geothermal hot water that the Hotel was using and we have Montserratians that could put together a geothermal system that we can give poor people free electricity
The Caribbean Development Bank can not throw good money after bad money and expect the next government to pay the loan for the new diesel power station because the amount of geothermal power Montserrat will be using to rebuild the economy would require geothermal power to back up geothermal power, not Diesel