Against a long-standing backdrop of heavy reliance on costly imported fossil fuels, Caribbean nations are facing growing pressure to transform their energy sectors – and a top energy official has laid out a clear path forward: combined purchasing power and standardized procurement systems. This call to action came from Kevin Hunte, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Energy and Business, during his opening address Tuesday at the regional workshop for the Caribbean Aggregation Procurement Programme (CAPP), hosted at the Courtyard by Marriott.
The two-day workshop gathered key stakeholders from across the region, including senior representatives from national energy ministries, independent energy regulators, and international development partners, to map out a framework for competitive, region-wide aggregated procurement of renewable energy infrastructure.
Hunte emphasized that the Caribbean’s energy dependency leaves the entire region exposed to outside shocks that local governments have no power to mitigate. “The vast majority of electricity that keeps our hospitals running, our schools open, our small businesses operating, and our homes lit comes from fossil fuels we import from other regions,” Hunte explained. “Every single kilowatt-hour consumers use ties their household costs to global commodity market shifts we cannot control, from price volatility triggered by geopolitical conflict to supply chain disruptions thousands of miles away.”
Unlike many other regions, Caribbean residents already contend with some of the highest electricity rates on the planet – but Hunte stressed that this burden is not the result of local mismanagement. Instead, it stems from the region’s inherent structural challenges: small, fragmented national energy markets, isolated standalone power grids, and decades of individual countries negotiating procurement separately. “Families in Bridgetown, Castries, Kingston, and Roseau all pay a premium for power not because of any choices they made, but because of the small scale of our individual markets, disconnected grids, and our historic pattern of approaching energy markets one country at a time,” he noted.
While the Caribbean is endowed with exceptional renewable energy potential – including strong solar radiation, consistent coastal winds, and untapped geothermal reserves – the pace of renewable energy deployment has lagged behind the global average for the last half decade. Regional stakeholders have already identified a growing pipeline of new renewable generation and battery storage projects across the area, but Hunte warned that continuing to pursue these projects on a national, individual basis will lock in unnecessarily high costs for decades to come.
“If we keep procuring these projects the way we always have, one country at a time, one tender at a time, we will keep paying that premium, and end up spending far more than the global average for the same clean energy assets and storage capacity,” Hunte said.
Hunte made the case that uniting regional energy demand and standardizing procurement processes and documentation would make the Caribbean a far more attractive investment destination for major international renewable energy developers and institutional investors. “If we pool our collective demand, align our procurement rules and standardize project documents, and present global developers with one cohesive, well-structured regional project pipeline instead of 15 separate fragmented national pipelines, the benefits are transformative,” he argued. “One of the most immediate gains is major combined cost savings – that’s money that stays in Caribbean communities, rather than flowing out to cover inflated procurement and infrastructure costs.”
Drawing on the region’s long history of successful collective action through institutions like the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, Hunte noted that Caribbean countries have already proven their ability to deliver results through cooperation. “When 15 Caribbean energy ministries come together to back a pipeline of several gigawatts of clean energy, structured with standardized contracts and built-in credit enhancement, that’s a tender that every major player in the global renewable energy industry will compete aggressively to win,” he said.