THE Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS) is gearing up for an expected explosion in alternative energy schemes and has vowed that it will do all it can to facilitate investors.

Members of the JPS team who were part of the Jamaican delegation in Salt Lake City, during the recent North America Smart Energy Week and at the Solar Power International (SPI) trade show, were in high demand as potential investors and suppliers sought more details on the light and power company.

“The Salt Lake City experience was a tremendous one. We were given an opportunity to interact with some very special potential partners in so many different ways.

In electric vehicles, in solar solutions, in various forms of new, innovative energy opportunities, so I think we had a very interesting experience,” Dionne Nugent, director of business development at JPS, told the Jamaica Observer at the end of the SPI show.

“The interest that we have seen in Jamaica, people were just stopping us on the floor of the exhibition hall just to understand what we are doing in Jamaica and how they could potentially help,” added Nugent.

She said it was clear that Jamaica was a major area of interest for many of the thousands of people who attended the expo and that the JPS has a key role to play in the development of Jamaica’s energy sector.

“We are here [in Salk Lake City] because we have to ensure that the sector is enabled to be sustainable, to be a success as this will have a tremendous impact on the Jamaican economy. We at the JPS recognise that role and we intend to execute on that role in a very positive way,” Nugent said.

“The JPS is ready to facilitate the investment and the energy sector and all of the ecosystems that are required to support the developments that are coming. And we are saying that even where we may be a little short, we believe that there is the external support that these investors can bring to help us to climb a little bit further,” declared Nugent.

In the meantime, Lincoy Small, director of systems operations at JPS, said the expo provided the company with new ideas for the micro-grids which it is now rolling out. The micro-grids will provide an alternative area of support for large JPS customers, give the company greater grid resilience for its average customers, and help to reduce the impact that electricity theft has on its grid.

“So that if, for any reason, they become disconnected from the grid there will be a back-up or redundant mechanism to supply them. So basically there is an improvement in the customer’s reliability, for the large scale and commercial customers as well as the average Joe,” said Small.

“Coming out of this conference, what we have learnt is how to create the levels of control to ensure that when we create these micro-grids they are stable and sustainable so that our customers will benefit for the full reliability.

“So we went to some very interesting seminars; they showed us how to maintain the stability of those grids and there are other players that we can partner with here to bring in some equipment to ensure that those grids, once we create them with the full approval of the ministry and the regulator, that we can roll that out,” added Small.

The JPS team was also introduced to cutting-edge technology on electric vehicles and Blaine Jarrett, senior vice-president for energy delivery at the company, told the Observer that the SPI Expo provided valuable lessons as it moves towards the phased roll-out of public charging stations.

“Electric vehicles have been an aspiration for us for some time. If you go back as far as 2014 we initiated an electric vehicle initiative. What we have learnt now is that it will only be successful if all the players come together — the regulator, the Government, the private sector — and the JPS being the enabler,” said Jarrett.

“What we have also recognised is that there are some low-hanging fruits and we want to look at the fleets, the buses, the garbage vehicles, as the fleet is where the opportunity is. What I have seen is that companies identify a local area where they believe a pilot can be successful. They collaborate around that pilot and align it to their strategic long-term goal.

“Bringing electric vehicles to Jamaica there are certain requirements. You want to ensure that when the vehicles are here, the chargers are here… and what we learnt [is] that when they come to Jamaica there must be all the available support systems,” added Jarrett.

He said JPS is also going to ensure that its grid infrastructure can support the demand for electric vehicles.