Turks and Caicos sits just 500 miles southeast of the Florida coast, but its residents pay nearly five times more for electricity than those in the Sunshine State. As elsewhere in the Caribbean, the cause is the high cost of importing diesel fuel for power generation. “It’s expensive to bring in diesel,” says George Lightbourne, the British overseas territory’s minister of government support services. “We’re paying [US] 50 cents per kilowatt hour. It makes things very hard for our residents, and on keeping us competitive. We’ve talked about alternatives [to diesel] for a long time, but we’d much prefer working with sustainable sources, which are wind and solar in our case.” Those costs led Turks and Caicos’ ministers to join dozens of Caribbean government officials... [Log in to read more]