Dominican Republic Baits $770 Million of Wind Farms With Perks

The Dominican Republic, the Caribbean country that shares an island with Haiti, plans to roll out $770 million of wind farms through 2015 by enticing developers with some of the region’s most generous rates for renewable energy.

Gamesa Corp. Tecnologica SA, Europe’s second-largest wind- turbine maker, and Spain’s Grupo Inveravante are among companies developing 350 megawatts of capacity over the next four years, said Hipolito Nunez, a national energy commission adviser.

The Dominican Republic gets about 12 percent of its power from renewable sources, with the rest generated from costlier fossil-fuel imports. It plans to boost that share to 25 percent by 2020 by offering wind developers more than double the amount of money for their electricity than is available in some other Latin American countries, according to Nunez.

“Wind energy is much cheaper than petroleum,” he said Aug. 2 in a telephone interview. “We will install the maximum that the grid can support.”

Under a government incentive mechanism for renewable energy, state-owned power utility Corp. Dominicana de Empresas Electricas Estatales, known as CDEEE, is offering about $137.40 for every megawatt-hour produced from wind farms, according to Ana-Maria Vidaurre, a team leader at the Inter-American Development Bank that’s financing two projects in the country.


Source: Bloomberg

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