The Grenada Solar Acceleration Program: Supporting Information

About this document

How to read this document

The white paper makes the argument. This document holds the working underneath it: the tables, dates, rates and project figures the argument rests on, each tied to its published source, so that any reader, a ministry official, a PURC analyst, a journalist, can check a number without taking the paper’s word for it.

Three conventions apply throughout. First, Eastern Caribbean dollars are the primary currency, with US dollars converted at the fixed peg of EC$2.70 = US$1.00. Barbados figures are in Barbados dollars (BBD$2.00 = US$1.00) as published. Second, where credible sources disagree, both figures are shown and the disagreement is stated rather than resolved by preference; the installed solar stock in Section 1 is the clearest case. Third, anything the research could not verify from published sources is not estimated or filled in. It is listed in Section 8 as an open question, in the form a Grenadian official could answer directly.

The research was compiled on 18 October 2026. Sources are marked in the register in Section 9 as verified live where the document itself was opened and read, and index where only search-result text was available. Tenders described as in progress, the airport solar award and the battery tender closing 23 October 2026 among them, may have advanced since.

Section 1

Sector data

Grenada’s electricity system is small, single-utility and diesel-based: one licensee, Grenada Electricity Services Ltd (Grenlec), serving Grenada, Carriacou and Petite Martinique, with electrification above 99.5 percent. The tables below assemble what the published record says about its size, its fuel mix and its customers. The snapshots come from different years and different publishers, and they do not always agree; each row carries its source and date so the differences stay visible.

System snapshots

Sources: NREL Island Energy Snapshot, Grenada (c.2015); CCREEE, Grenada Energy Report Card 2020 (released January 2024); Grenlec Annual Report 2020; PURC tender background as reported by pv-magazine, 19 November 2024; Grenlec filing to the Eastern Caribbean Securities Regulatory Commission (ECSRC), September 2024, which also records fuel efficiency of 18.61 kWh per imperial gallon for the first nine months of 2024. Grenlec reported record monthly sales through the first half of 2024, up 15.21 percent year to date against 2023 before Hurricane Beryl. In 2025 Grenlec rented an additional 10 MW of temporary capacity and began procuring new engines; the World Bank has noted that many Grenlec units reach the end of their economic life within two to four years of February 2025.

Generation mix and installed capacity, 2024

The installed solar stock: four published figures

How much solar Grenada already has depends on which publisher and which definition is used. All four figures below are in the published record; they differ by what they count (solar only or all renewables, utility or customer-owned) and by date. They are shown together because the white paper’s baseline, and any target set against it, depends on which one is adopted.

Solar resource

Global horizontal irradiation exceeds 5 kWh per square metre per day; the National Energy Policy annex gives a range of 5 to 6 kWh per square metre per day. The one Grenadian project with a published yield projection, Limlair on Carriacou, works out to about 1,828 kWh per kWp per year (Section 6). IRENA’s SolarCity Simulator assessment of St George’s, Grand Anse, Grenville and Hillsborough in Carriacou found that 30 MW of rooftop PV in those four towns could meet 28.5 percent of Grenada’s electricity demand. No published audit of hotel, public-building or warehouse roof area was found beyond that four-town assessment, and no feeder-level hosting capacity study or map was found at all; both gaps are carried into Section 8.

Section 2

Tariff history and structure

A Grenadian electricity bill has three parts: a non-fuel charge fixed by customer class, a fuel charge that passes the cost of imported diesel through to customers, and government charges. The non-fuel charge has barely moved since 2016. Nearly all of the movement in what households and businesses actually pay comes from diesel.

Non-fuel charge by customer class

Source: Grenlec notice, 13 September 2022. These rates have been unchanged since 2016, apart from a temporary 25 percent reduction that ran from 5 January to 8 September 2022. Tariff reform remains unfinished: Grenlec submitted an Interim Tariff Methodology to PURC in 2022 and was still awaiting feedback in its 2022 reporting, and the legacy fuel and non-fuel structure remains in use.

The fuel charge

Grenlec treats fuel as a pass-through to customers. In its 2022 reporting the company described customers paying an average of the fuel price over the prior three months, which produces under-recovery when prices rise and over-recovery when they fall: under-recovery of EC$5.4 million in 2021, over-recovery of EC$1.65 million in 2022, and over-recovery of EC$16.15 million reported for the first half of 2024 alone. Grenlec was reviewing its Fuel Adjustment Clause to move to full monthly pass-through. Sampled fuel charge values from Grenlec’s own bill materials and filings:

The realised average rate

Government charges

Two government charges sit on top of the energy charges. The environmental levy is EC$5.00 for domestic customers using 100 to 150 kWh and EC$10.00 above 150 kWh, and is paid over to the Solid Waste Management Authority. VAT is charged at 7.5 percent on the non-fuel component only, with the first 99 kWh for domestic customers exempt. Renewable energy equipment imports carry a full waiver of duties and taxes, with only a 6 percent customs service charge applied, as stated in NDC 3.0.

A time-limited government relief package runs from August to December 2026: VAT zero-rated on the non-fuel component for all customers, a EC$50 credit for domestic customers using 1 to 200 kWh, and temporary removal of the 6 percent customs service charge on diesel imported for generation, which Grenlec describes as the only government tax on that diesel. The package says something about tariff politics in Grenada: headline rates can move quickly, and by decision rather than by formula.

What exported solar has been paid

No current PURC-published avoided-cost figure was found, and no published net-billing or net-metering export rate in force was located; the World Bank’s CEGEB project, approved in February 2025, lists developing net-billing guidelines for solar as work still to be done. The only Grenadian buy-back rate in the record is historical: in 2016 and 2017, customer renewable energy exported to the grid was paid at roughly EC$0.45 per kWh (about US$0.17), under either a historical-average fuel-cost option or a prior-year fuel-value option, against a retail price at the time of about EC$1.08 per kWh. In other words, exports were valued at fuel cost only, at well under half the price the same customer paid for imports. That fuel-only logic is the single most important tariff fact for distributed solar design, and whether it still governs is the first of the open questions in Section 8.

Section 3

Grenlec and PURC: a timeline

The present structure of the sector was set in three moves: the 1994 privatisation, which locked in a monopoly to 2073; the 2016 Acts, which opened the sector in law and triggered an arbitration that cost the state US$63 million to settle; and the slow build-out of the regulator since. The dates below are the spine of that story.

The self-generator caps in force, as stated in NDC 3.0, are the operative constraint on rooftop solar today: residential systems are limited to 120 percent of nominal daily electricity demand, and commercial systems to 60 percent. Both the caps and the wider framework are stated in NDC 3.0 to be under review.

Section 4

Project register

The pipeline is suddenly large relative to a 37.67 MW peak grid. The register below lists each project the research found, with its capacity, its status as published, and the figures attached to it. Where the sources leave a relationship between projects unclear, the register says so rather than guessing.

Hurricane Beryl: the stress test the register has to answer

Beryl made Category 4 landfall on Carriacou on 1 July 2024. The Post-Disaster Needs Assessment (Government of Grenada and UNDP, March 2025) put total effects at EC$595.16 million, 16.74 percent of 2023 GDP, with 40,600 people affected, 39 percent of the population. Two other official figures circulate and are not the same measure: the IMF’s January 2025 Article IV put damage at about 16 percent of GDP, and the World Bank’s country page cites a GRADE assessment of US$218 million in damages; the Prime Minister’s early estimate of roughly a third of annual output was superseded by both. Energy-sector damage was US$4.77 million with losses of US$2.56 million. Grenlec had 19,318 customers offline: 15,307 on the mainland (25 percent) and 4,011 in Carriacou and Petite Martinique (100 percent). Ninety-seven percent of mainland customers were restored by the end of the first week; full restoration took until the end of October 2024, with CARILEC mutual-assistance crews from six regional utilities. Grenlec’s CCRIF parametric payout was US$9,323,275 (EC$25.1 million), paid within 14 days; government CCRIF payouts across its policies totalled US$44 million. Part of Grenlec’s payout funds undergrounding the St George’s West feeder serving the General Hospital and the Carriacou West feeder serving the desalination plant.

Section 5

Caribbean peer programs

Grenada is not choosing in the abstract. Four neighbours have already run the experiments that matter: a published feed-in tariff in Barbados, utility tenders in Jamaica, a utility-owned first plant and simple net metering in St Lucia, and publicly de-risked geothermal in Dominica. The regional floor is set by the OECS roadmap. The detail below is what the white paper’s benchmarking rests on.

Barbados: the feed-in tariff

Barbados runs the region’s most developed distributed solar market, built on the Renewable Energy Rider and then a feed-in tariff (FIT) programme administered by the Fair Trading Commission (FTC): fixed tariffs for 20 years, set from the cost of generation, differentiated by system size, allocated first come, first served. Before the FIT, the Rider paid BBD$0.416 per kWh for solar. Systems at or below 3 kW operate on sale of excess only; larger systems on buy all, sell all. Community-shared projects, with at least 15 residential investors and no single owner above 50 percent, received a 10 percent premium in the first round, and Rider customers were grandfathered for 20 years.

Sources: Barbados FTC feed-in tariff decisions. The 2023 round allocated 27.6 MW to solar out of 32.6 MW across all technologies. US cent figures are converted at the Barbados peg of BBD$2.00 = US$1.00. Per-band rates for the middle bands of the 2019 to 2021 round were not extracted in this research; only the endpoints of the published range, BBD$0.3425 to 0.3975 per kWh across the programme, are stated in the text.

The comparison that matters for Grenada is proportional. Barbados reached 39 MW of distributed PV on a grid of roughly 135 MW peak. Scaled to Grenada’s 37.67 MW peak, the same penetration is about 10 MW of rooftop and small commercial solar, roughly twelve times what the SSIPP pilot licensed in its first three years. Barbados has since run into grid-absorption and licensing constraints at higher penetrations, widely reported regionally; those reports were not verified against a primary FTC source in this research, and the lesson cuts both ways: a published tariff works, and the grid rules have to be ready for what it brings.

Jamaica: scale by tender

Jamaica had 188 MW of renewable capacity by December 2024, about 10 percent of generation, up from 7 percent in 2016 (solar 3.05 percent and wind 5.89 percent of generation in 2024). Its target is 50 percent renewable generation by 2030. About 100 MW of solar was awarded in November 2024 and further utility tenders in the 300 MW class are in preparation. Net billing and wheeling frameworks exist under the Office of Utilities Regulation, though the rate detail was not verified in this research. The Jamaican path is the inverse of Barbados: capacity arrives through competitive utility tenders, and household rooftop plays a secondary role.

St Lucia: utility first, then a simple window

St Lucia’s first utility-scale renewable plant was the 3 MW La Tourney solar farm (2018, EC$20 million, owned by LUCELEC), generating about 7 GWh a year. Small-scale integration runs through net metering for residential systems of 5 to 25 kW; a residential customer using 800 kWh a month paid about US$0.337 per kWh in the April 2026 sector snapshot. The next step is a tender for 10 MW of solar with 13 MW (about 26 MWh, two-hour) of battery storage, with bids due in January 2026 on secondary reporting. St Lucia is Grenada’s partner in both CEGEB and the regional finance facility below.

Dominica: the geothermal template

Dominica’s 10 MW geothermal plant in the Roseau Valley (Laudat) is the working model for the path Grenada is on. The state de-risked the drilling with concessional finance from the CDB, the Green Climate Fund and the World Bank, then signed a 25-year build-own-operate power purchase agreement with Ormat at COP28 in 2023, with transfer at term. Construction began in June 2024, was about 90 percent complete in August 2025, and commissioning was scheduled from December 2025 with commercial operations targeted for March 2026; a new high-voltage line to Fond Cole (US$1.88 million from an existing World Bank loan) connects it. Dominica’s goal is about 100 percent renewable electricity by 2030. The sequencing is the lesson: roughly fifteen years separate Dominica’s early drilling from its plant, which is why Section 7 treats Grenada’s geothermal as a 2030s resource and solar plus storage as the resource that can move this decade.

The OECS floor

The OECS Sustainable Energy Roadmap 2025 to 2035 and the Basseterre Declaration, adopted at the third Council of Ministers: Energy meeting in St Kitts on 4 to 5 February 2025, set 30 percent renewable penetration across the OECS by 2030, with a minimum of 20 percent in each member state, and 50 percent by 2035. Grenada’s minister, Kerryne James, was the outgoing chair of the Council. Regional context from the same process: OECS tariffs run from EC$0.41 to EC$1.08 per kWh, and diesel accounts for 75 percent to nearly 100 percent of installed capacity in some member states. Grenada’s own commitments sit inside that frame: NDC 3.0 holds the economy-wide target at 40 percent below 2010 emissions by 2030, maintained or deepened to 2035 and conditional on international support, prices the whole transition at over US$2 billion, and commits Carriacou and Petite Martinique to 100 percent renewable electricity.

Section 6

Diesel displacement economics

Every figure in this section is built from one local anchor: the Limlair project on Carriacou, whose published projection was 1,565 MWh a year from 856 kWp, a yield of about 1,828 kWh per kWp per year (a capacity factor of about 21 percent), saving more than 83,500 gallons of diesel a year. Because it is a Grenadian project on a Grenadian island, its yield already reflects local cloud, temperature and system losses in a way an imported modelling figure would not.

The anchor, scaled

How the two diesel columns are derived. Limlair ratio: the project’s stated saving of about 316,081 litres a year divided by its 856 kWp, or 369 litres per kWp per year. Fleet efficiency: Grenlec reported fuel efficiency of 18.61 kWh per imperial gallon for the first nine months of 2024; 1,828 MWh at that rate needs about 98,200 imperial gallons, or about 447,000 litres, per MWp. The range between the columns is real: which diesel a solar kilowatt-hour displaces depends on which generating set is backed off, and small island sets on Carriacou differ from the Queen’s Park fleet. Both bounds are from Grenadian sources; no imported conversion factor is used.

Fuel spend and foreign exchange context

PURC’s chief executive stated in 2024 that “over one hundred and fifty million dollars are spent on fuel for these generators annually”; the report of that statement does not specify whether the figure is EC or US dollars, and at EC$150 million it would be about US$55.6 million a year. A commercial source cites about 47.9 million litres of imported diesel a year for electricity alone, undated. On that import figure, 10 MWp of solar at the Limlair ratio displaces roughly 7.7 percent of the diesel imported for generation, and generates about 9 percent of the electricity Grenlec sold in 2020 (18,280 MWh against sales of 202,460 MWh). Every litre displaced is a litre that does not have to be bought in foreign currency: across the Eastern Caribbean, fossil fuel imports averaged US$444 million a year from 2016 to 2021, 15.4 percent of total imports, on World Bank figures. That regional figure is context, not a Grenadian statistic; no Grenada-specific series for the electricity fuel import bill was found (open question 7).

Two cautions belong with this arithmetic. First, Grenlec’s fuel recovery swings, from EC$5.4 million of under-recovery in 2021 to EC$16.15 million of over-recovery in half of 2024, mean the avoided cost in any given year moves with the oil price and the averaging window; a program priced off a single year’s fuel charge will be wrong in both directions over its life. Second, displacement is not the same as bill savings for the utility unless the export price is set below the avoided fuel cost, which is exactly the design question the white paper addresses. What the arithmetic does establish is scale: on Grenada’s small grid, single-digit megawatts of distributed solar are not marginal. Ten megawatts is a measurable share of national fuel imports.

Section 7

Geothermal briefing

Geothermal is Grenada’s baseload bet, and the white paper treats solar plus storage as its complement rather than its substitute. This briefing records where the Mt St Catherine project stands, what money is behind it, and the timeline the published record supports.

Section 8

Open questions register

The research behind the white paper was thorough and still could not verify the items below from published sources. They are set out plainly, as questions, because each one is answerable by a Grenadian official, regulator or utility officer, and several of them, the current export price above all, are load-bearing for program design. Nothing in the white paper rests on an assumed answer to any of them.

Section 9

Source register

All sources were read or searched on 18 October 2026. Each entry is marked verified live where the document itself was opened and read during the research, or index where only search-result text was available. Where sources disagree, Sections 1 and 4 give both figures.

Primary and official

1. Verified liveGovernment of Grenada, Ministry of Climate Resilience, Grenada’s Third Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC 3.0), October 2025. climateresilience.gov.gd
2. Verified liveMinistry of Climate Resilience portal, Limlair Solar PV Hybrid Project, Carriacou. climateresilience.gov.gd
3. Verified liveCCREEE, Grenada Energy Report Card 2020 (January 2024 release). cekh.ccreee.org
4. Verified liveWorld Bank, Caribbean Efficient and Green-Energy Buildings Project approval release, 28 February 2025. worldbank.org
5. IndexGovernment Information Service, Grenlec share repurchase release, 29 December 2020. ecseonline.com
6. IndexPublic Utilities Regulatory Commission, Draft Supply Code (posted March 2026, still draft). purc.gd
7. IndexPublic Utilities Regulatory Commission, Tariff Setting Methodology, responses to comments. purc.gd
8. IndexElectricity Supply Act No. 19 of 2016; PURC Act No. 20 of 2016; PURC (Amendment) Act No. 2 of 2025, legislative records via InforMEA. informea.org · informea.org · informea.org
9. IndexGrenlec, non-fuel rate notice, 13 September 2022. grenlec.com
10. IndexGrenlec, How Your Domestic Bill is Calculated, flyer, February 2024. grenlec.com
11. IndexGrenlec, Understanding Your New Bill, brochure, August 2023. grenlec.com
12. IndexGrenlec, government relief factsheet, 2026. grenlec.com
13. IndexGrenlec, 2024 Year in Review (Beryl restoration). grenlec.com
14. IndexGrenlec, CCRIF payout release. grenlec.com
15. IndexGrenlec, PURC and RMI memorandum release, March 2025. grenlec.com
16. IndexGrenlec, Annual Report 2020. grenlec.com
17. IndexGrenlec filings to the ECSRC: 2022 annual reporting; June and September 2024; June 2025. ecsrc.com · ecseonline.com
18. IndexEnvironmental and Social Impact Assessment, MBIA Solar PV, BESS and Transmission Project. climateresilience.gov.gd
19. IndexCEGEB Environmental and Social Management Framework, October 2025. climateresilience.gov.gd
20. IndexGovernment of Grenada and UNDP, Post-Disaster Needs Assessment, Hurricane Beryl, March 2025. undp.org
21. IndexCCRIF SPC, Grenlec payout release and post-Beryl payout-use synopsis. ccrif.org · ccrif.org
22. IndexInternational Monetary Fund, Grenada 2024 Article IV Consultation, January 2025. imf.org
23. IndexCaribbean Development Bank, geothermal board paper and 2025 geothermal and battery releases. caribank.org · caribank.org
24. IndexWorld Bank, Regional Renewable Energy and Infrastructure Investment Facility release, 17 April 2025. worldbank.org
25. IndexWorld Bank, Development Policy Credit release, July 2023. worldbank.org
26. IndexGreen Climate Fund, G-CREWS project page. greenclimate.fund
27. IndexOECS Commission, Sustainable Energy Roadmap 2025 to 2035 and Basseterre Declaration releases, February 2025. pressroom.oecs.int · pressroom.oecs.int
28. IndexBarbados Fair Trading Commission, feed-in tariff decisions; Government of Barbados, Ministerial Statement on renewable energy, December 2020. ftc.gov.bb · internationalbusiness.gov.bb · barbados parliamentary papers
29. IndexT.A. Marryshow Community College, programme listings. tamcc.edu.gd · tamcc.edu.gd

Secondary and regional reporting

1. Indexpv-magazine: Grenada launches 15.1 MW utility-scale PV tender, 19 November 2024; Grenada seeks installers for Solar for All program, 22 January 2026. pv-magazine.com · pv-magazine.com
2. IndexCaribbean Times / Caribbean Media Corporation, PURC grants licences to Small-Scale Independent Power Producers. caribbeantimes.com
3. IndexThinkGeoEnergy: Grenada geothermal funding and drilling preparation, 2025; Dominica plant commissioning. thinkgeoenergy.com · thinkgeoenergy.com
4. IndexReuters, via Claims Journal, Grenada first to activate hurricane clause, 20 August 2024. claimsjournal.com
5. IndexIMI Daily, compilation of Investment Migration Agency data on the Citizenship by Investment programme, 2024 to 2025. Gross programme revenue includes amounts due to approved-project developers; the government share is smaller. imidaily.com
6. IndexGlobal Energy Monitor, country energy profiles: Grenada, Barbados, Jamaica. gem.wiki
7. IndexNREL, Island Energy Snapshot: Grenada. nrel.gov
8. IndexGIZ, Reform of the Electricity Sector to Support Climate Policy in Grenada. giz.de
9. IndexJamaica Information Service, progress toward the 50 percent renewable energy target. jis.gov.jm
10. IndexRMI, Saint Lucia Solar Park Opens, 2018. rmi.org
11. IndexBusiness Grenada, Issue 7, 2016 to 2017: interconnection buy-back rates and Carriacou peak. joomag.com
12. IndexCommonwealth Secretariat, Mobilising climate finance for NDCs: lessons from Grenada’s resource mobilisation strategy. thecommonwealth.org

Research compiled 18 October 2026 from the sources above. Figures are as published by their sources on that date; programs and tenders described as in progress may have advanced since, and the open questions in Section 8 stand until a source above, or the responsible Grenadian institution, answers them.