Senator the Hon. Darcy Boyce, Minister responsible for Energy and Telecommunications (left), speaking with students of Frederick Smith Secondary School at the Youth Energy Forum yesterday.
A Government Senator wants to see more homeowners across Barbados installing solar water heaters.
To make this a reality, Senator the Hon. Darcy Boyce, Minister responsible for Energy and Telecommunications believes that the cost of these systems needs to be reduced.
“I have been trying to push the people in the solar water heating sector to further ways in which we can get [the price of] solar water heaters to come down; to be more affordable for more people in the population.
“We have a good penetration of solar water heaters – probably 50 000 houses – but I would like to us increase that number to about 60 000 to 65 000 over the next five to ten years. But to get there we have to get the cost down,” he stressed.
Senator Boyce, who was at the time addressing yesterday’s Barbados Youth Energy Forum, told the secondary school students gathered at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre that there may be a role for them in discovering how to get solar water heating systems to the stage where a lot more people can have them on their properties.
The Forum, held under the theme “Sustainable Energy: Reflecting on the past, looking to the future”, was an initiative of the Division of Energy & Telecommunications, and sought to inform, educate and explore some of the intricacies associated with sustainable energy – past, present and a futuristic look at its development.
The Senator also highlighted that one of the ways to make Barbados better and stronger is to focus on energy. He said that the one way the island is going to reduce its energy consumption is by changing out current lightings to LED.
“To get that done we are going to need a really strong communications package to get out to all the people about how we use energy, how we change out the lights and so on…Saving our energy not only means lighting, but it means for example economising with the use of water, because in Barbados water cost us a lot of money for energy – probably the highest user of electricity is the water services.”
Senator Boyce further stressed to students, “You are the ones who are going to move forward this country in the next 50 years… Whatever we do in technology, whatever we do in this country in the next 50 years - you have to do it, you have to lead it; you have to conceive it. We might as well get used to having you make inputs into this process of conceiving how we go forward or figure out the strategies that we should use to implement what we need to make Barbados better and stronger.”
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