KINGSTON, Jamaica — Former Energy Minister Phillip Paulwell says the People’s National Party (PNP) will give power back to the people and democratise the electricity industry in Jamaica once they win the next General Election.

He was speaking at the St Andrew East Central Constituency Conference on Sunday.

Addressing the party supporters, Paulwell said, “We are going to democratise the way electricity is done in Jamaica and we are going to give you the power through a lot of the new technologies, especially solar, to generate your own electricity and then JPS (Jamaica Public Service Company) can come to you and offer to buy power from you.”

Since July’s passing of Hurricane Beryl, the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS) has come under fire for its restoration timeline as well as for the exorbitant August bills distributed to customers, some who were without light for most of the billing period.

This has since triggered several calls from the public for a review of the company’s licence.

Paulwell noted that when he was energy minister in 2016, he made two changes to the 2011 licence which would have been renewed then under a JLP administration.

“The only things that I added were one, to give the Jamaican consumer greater power over how they are treated by the JPSco. Secondly, we recognised that there was need to separate the accounts of the company because the company has been involved in generation of electricity, in distribution and transmission and they were also involved in the system planning, what we call dispatch, and in that 2016 agreement it was mandated but nothing has happened since that time because there was a change in government,” he explained.

Paulwell added, “Many of those provisions that were put in the JPSco licence to benefit the people are still not yet being put in force and is one of the things we have to do when we get back into power.”