Clean energy production to begin by year’s end

Seychelles will soon benefit from energy produced at the landfill from waste material dumped there – following a new approach of regarding waste as a resource that could benefit the country.

Minister for Home Affairs, Environment, Transport and Energy Joel Morgan announced the plans to start using waste from both landfills at Providence to produce electricity through the methane gases collected at the sites.

Minister Morgan made the statement after an official visit held at the site recently with a team of technical experts from his ministry.

“This is a project that excites everyone involved with it, as it features on the 2020 vision of reusing and recycling whatever we can and create energy,” he said.

The gas produced on the landfill will be extracted and sent to the plant situated next to it, to be burnt in a burner fuelled by the rubbish found on both sites.

A committee comprising the principal secretaries for environment, energy and representatives from the Public Utilities Company (PUC) evaluated the technical submissions that were made to run the project.

“Four companies have tendered out their proposals to the committee and once they have been evaluated, they will be sent to the tender board so that it can award the contract to the best one,” said Mr Morgan.

Mr Morgan explained that the company awarded the project then has to set up the energy plant.

“It will have to install its equipment such as the bio-mass combustion equipment, generators and any others needed to run the plant to produce electricity which will be sold to PUC,” he said.

“PUC will have a buy-back agreement where it will buy the electricity the company generates to distribute nationally – supplementing what it already supplies.”

However Mr Morgan explained that although the company will be expected to produce quite an amount of electricity, it will not be more that 20 percent of what PUC provides locally.

“The plant’s technical capacity and its commercial viability means that it will only provide for additional electricity demands PUC has to cater for in future,” he said.

According to Mr Morgan, the project to establish the energy plant at Providence is one that the President as well as those in his ministry are very excited about.

“This is a mix of PUC and an independent electricity provider working together and complementing to meet the national demand for power, which will also save us the cost of buying petroleum products needed in its production,” he said.

However although the new plant will save the country the money spent on petroleum products, Mr Morgan said they are not sure how this will affect electricity bills prices yet.

“Once the production cost is established in the tendered project, it is only then that we will be able to know how this affects the national costs of producing electricity,” he said.

Mr Morgan said the government’s objective is stabilising the country’s electricity cost as well as everything else.

“We are currently relying on the fuel stabilisation fund that was established recently to absorb the cost of fuel prices rise to keep electricity prices steady.”

Mr Morgan also explained that as Seychelles depends heavily on fuels to produce electricity, the more the government can move away from petroleum products, it will make it easier to stabilise the energy prices in the country.

The plant is expected to be up and running in conjunction with the new landfill sometime in November.

Source: Seychelles Nation