Obama is giving Jamaica $30 million of our tax dollars - from Jamaica's The Gleaner:
Jamaica Gets First Grant Under US Clean Energy Finance Facility
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has awarded the first grant through the Clean Energy Finance Facility for the Caribbean and Central America (CEFF-CCA), to help develop a 37 megawatt solar farm in Westmoreland.
CEFF-CCA will provide support to Rekamniar Capital Limited, the project developer, to partner with independent power producer Neoen on forming the Eight Rivers Energy Company, which will build the solar facility, according to a release from the US embassy in Kingston.
A bit more:
The purpose of the grant is to support selected legal, consulting and engineering costs in late stage project development, it said.
So the engineering companies and lawyers and a couple of well-connected bureaucrats will get their pockets lined and none of this money will be used to any benefit of the people. If they wanted cheap energy, they should build a coal plant or get serious about it and build a small nuke - waste heat from the nuke would be an excellent resource for a desalination plant for clean water.
The other point of interest is that Jamaica has a long history of being hit by hurricanes. Since 2000, Jamaica has been hit by nine full-fledged hurricanes (link to the Jamaican National Library - PDF document) causing massive property damage. I can only imagine what will happen to the solar panels when a CAT 3 or greater flows over them.
What's more, this document (PDF format) from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory indicates that just the cost of the panels for 37 Megawatts will run about $74 million not counting the substation, any energy storage or transmission lines. And this is for USA construction - not hurricane hardened. Obama's donation of $30 million of our taxpayer dollars does nothing to advance the construction of this facility and just makes a few people very rich.
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