The Bermuda Environmental Sustainability Taskforce is astonished that the Regulatory Authority has recently chosen to power Bermuda on liquefied natural gas for the latest Integrated Resource Plan.

This follows the recent 300 per cent monthly increase in the facilities charge for solar customers, effectively shutting down the island’s solar businesses and making it cheaper for some customers to remove their panels. Both decisions move us further away from renewable energy targets. RA, where is your energy future vision?

After the LNG decision, it is now understandable why the minister paused the IRP. It is ridiculous that the RA, a publicly funded institution, is paying what will be high legal bills to sue the minister. Effectively, it’s a case of “the people“ suing “the people“ … and we are all going to pay for that.

Furthermore, we call out the potential bias and possible conflicts of interest within the RA, whose chairman, Mark Fields, is the former general manager of Sol Petroleum and whose director, Dennis Pimentel, is a past manager at Belco. There are no consumer activists or renewable energy experts represented within the RA.

Choosing to power Bermuda on LNG would mean Belco will need to invest at least $200 million in a regasification plant and high-risk pipes to bring the high-pressured gas from the East End or perhaps even the West End to its Pembroke plant. Imagine what might happen to our cruise business if there were an incident at a plant in Dockyard, one of the sites being considered.

Best commissioned the Rocky Mountain Institute to make a submission on the recent National Energy Policy. RMI is an independent, non-profit that transforms global energy systems through market-driven solutions to secure a prosperous, resilient, clean energy future for all.

They said: “The RA’s 2019 IRP was a rigorous ‘least-cost’ analysis that evaluated eight scenarios across 29 sensitivity cases. Its base-case modelling identified LNG-conversion scenarios as having the lowest system costs over the 2020-2040 planning horizon. Despite that 2019 statement, it still selected a non-LNG pathway, establishing a target of 85 per cent renewables by 2035 at an approximately 6 per cent cost premium on the explicit grounds that the LNG pathway carried ”higher regret risk“, given uncertainty in long-term fuel prices and the irreversibility of LNG infrastructure investment that could exceed $100 million.

As the rest of the world transitions to renewable energy, the infrastructure costs for LNG will mean that Bermuda is locked into fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. There was an overwhelming public response to the 2019 IRP, with 800 submissions, most of which were against LNG and supportive of increased renewables for Bermuda’s energy future. Since then, the price of solar and batteries has come down significantly and continues to drop exponentially, making the economic choice between fossil fuels and renewable energy even clearer.

Meanwhile, the LNG investment is now $100 million more, which begs the RA to justify their decision to pursue LNG now.

Equally important, other island nations have studied LNG and fossil fuel investments and have chosen to move away from them:

Hawaii

We quote from their conclusion:

“If Hawaii maintains a dependency on imported fuels, it accepts a permanent requirement for annual capital outflow to global markets. In contrast, prioritising local renewable generation shifts the economic burden to upfront capital investment.

“Once these local assets are amortised, the marginal cost of production is near-zero, effectively ending the state’s century-long exposure to imported fuel costs and price volatility.

“Policymakers should consider a ‘Direct Renewable Investment’ scenario. Redirecting the LNG infrastructure capital toward utility-scale solar, BESS [battery energy storage systems], and grid transmission upgrades avoids the volatility of global fuel markets and the risk of stranded assets, providing a more secure pathway toward the state’s goals of cheaper electricity and eliminating its dependence on imported fuels.”

Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority IRP proceedings, the proposed large-scale LNG expansion pathways were successfully challenged through detailed modelling that showed how imported gas infrastructure could lock in decades of high capital expenditure and stranded asset risk, while under-utilising increasingly lower-cost and more resilient distributed solar and storage alternatives.

Turks & Caicos Islands

In its own R-NETS, the TCI government and utility (FortisTCI) evaluated multiple energy scenarios over a 22-year horizon. The analysis conclusively scored the “microgrid-capable” and “utility-scale renewable” scenarios highest across key metrics for least-cost, reliability, and resilience, drastically outperforming the “business as usual” fossil-fuel approach.

This evidence base empowered TCI to introduce ambitious renewable energy legislation focused on competitive tendering and distributed generation.

Cayman Islands

The Cayman Islands provides a powerful blueprint for stabilising rates without resorting to natural gas. By explicitly avoiding the massive capital expenditure of LNG infrastructure, the government has accelerated competitive utility-scale solar tenders backed by extensive battery energy storage systems, driving to officially classify solar-plus-storage as reliable "firm power“.

Concurrently, by negotiating better, more transparent short-term diesel contracts out of Houston, the Cayman Islands successfully stabilised its baseline fuel costs while building out its renewable grid. This dual-pronged strategy is driving positive rate improvements, with projections indicating consumer savings of up to CI$105 monthly (approximately $1,260 annually) per household.

Many of these studies and modelling exercises were completed several years ago, and the economics of renewable energy have continued to improve materially since then. The continued decline in solar PV and battery storage costs, alongside improvements in performance and operational maturity, likely makes many of these modelled renewable and storage pathways even more economically attractive today than when the original analyses were conducted.

BEST feels the RA should explicitly acknowledge the 2019 IRP’s regret-risk findings and explain how LNG’s risk profile has materially improved since then.

• Kim Smith is the executive director of the Bermuda Environmental Sustainability Taskforce