Every day for the last 10 years, the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS) has trucked 31,000 litres of water from a well at its Hunts Bay plant to the diesel station at Rockfort to keep the engines cool.

The exercise racked up an annual bill of US$35,000, but as at April this year, it’s a cost with which the utility company no longer has to contend. That’s because it has acquired a desalination unit which it touts as a first of its kind in the region.

The unit, an Aqua Blue-C100 freshwater generator from Alfa Laval, makes pure distilled water from the waters of the Kingston Harbour where the Rockfort plant sits on a barge. It uses heat produced by the diesel engines in the electricity generation process to boil the seawater, which condenses the water vapour. It has a capacity of 30,000 litres per 24 hours.

“The distilled water is processed to two parts per million salinity or below and can be used for both domestic and industrial purposes,” engineer Damion Whyte tells the Jamaica Observer.

The water produced is enough to meet all the needs of the Rockfort power station’s operations with reserve capacity, JPS says.

“We wanted to move away from the trucking of water and drawing down on the well because of the impact on the budget and the impact on the environment,” plant manager Glenroy Leslie explains.

“That money is operating expenditure that can be saved to the bottom line. Plus, why would we keep using up the resources of the aquifers when the sea has unlimited capacity?” he continues.

The demand for water from the Hunts Bay aquifer is expected to reduce by approximately 20 per cent as a result.

The Rockfort power station was commissioned in 1985 and produces 40 megawatts of electricity from its two slow-speed diesel engines. It previously had a desalination unit, in the early 2000s, but it only lasted about three years. The latest installation has a manufacturer recommended lifespan of 10 years, but Leslie says “with proper maintenance it can last much longer”.

JPS seems particularly proud of the move to desalination, evidenced by plant employees not missing an opportunity to detail the ways in which it exemplifies environmental responsibility.

“It reduces our carbon footprint because it uses waste heat energy that would normally be expelled into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming,” acting operations manager Carlinton Brown says.

Health, safety, security, and environment officer Al Pilliner says it forms part of the company’s Clean and Green programme, and reflects its commitment to minimising the impact of its operations on the environment.

Clean and Green is a wide-ranging sustainability campaign which is but one aspect of the multiple ways the company says it is re-imagining energy in 2016.