By Andre Huie
PHILIPSBURG — Several political candidates contesting the St. Maarten August 19 elections have been speaking on the severe load shedding St. Maarteners have been experiencing over the past few months and are calling for solutions.
The power and water company GEBE has been experiencing major power generation issues in recent months, triggering frequent power outages and constant complaints from consumers, especially business owners, some of whom have invested in generators to help solve their power problems.
Candidate for the Soualiga Action Movement (SAM) Claude “Chacho” Peterson, who himself is an engineer, is proposing adding a renewable energy component to the current fossil fuel source at GEBE, which can alleviate some of the burden on power generation.
“In my opinion, we need to get between 20 and 30 percent of GEBE’s production of electricity from solar (energy). I think it’s possible. I want to see GEBE be one of the leaders in the solar energy department, not only to buy back the electricity from the solar panels, but I want GEBE to also sell solar panels,” he said.
“I want GEBE to be able to finance solar panels so basically, I can get my solar panels from GEBE, GEBE come to my house, gives me an estimate, deals with the whole installation and connection and the servicing and every month I get charged on my bill. The financing can be done through GEBE and GEBE can use banks, team up with banks and basically, I have paid on my bill…I think this is where we need to go as an island,” Peterson added.
Meanwhile candidate number 10 for the United Resilient St. Maarten Movement (URSM) Michael Somersall, says systems need to be put in place to make managers of government owned companies like GEBE more accountable to the public. “For GEBE, a contingency plan should have been in place already and for that I will hold government accountable. It was government who had to make sure that that plan was in place and that it could be executed,” he said. “If generators broke down, we shouldn’t have to be sourcing which company to get them from, it should have been a phone call away because that should have been done already with a budget attached to it,” Somersall noted.
The Government of St. Maarten sourced container generators recently, which Prime Minister Luc Mercelina disclosed this week, should be operational before the end of the month. These generators are stop gap measures until larger generators are sourced.
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