CaribPR Wire

L.R.: Ujjwal Bhattacharjee, Felicia Persaud, Loreto Duffy-Mayers and Tony Fiddy at the “Going Green” Invest Caribbean Now Forum on April 18, 2012 in Guyana. (CTO image)

CaribPR Wire, NEW YORK, NY, April 23, 2012: A panelist at the first green investment forum at the Caribbean Tourism Organization’s Sustainable Tourism Conference believes waste to energy plants in the region could help solve the problems of high power cost.

Tony Fiddy, President of the Waste to Energy Division and Regional Vice President for Europe and Africa, Naanovo Energy Inc., says waste to energy plants could lower the power costs of many nations tremendously.

“In St. Kitts we will be building a plant and selling power for US.20 cents to the government there, resulting in a huge savings that will be passed along to the consumer,” said Fiddy, a panelist on the “Going Green” Invest Caribbean Now Forum, organized by Felicia Persaud’s Hard Beat Communications and the CTO, and held on Wednesday, April 18, 2012, from 8:30 to 10 a.m. at the Guyana International Conference Centre in Liliendaal, Guyana.

The forum also featured Loreto Duffy-Mayers, Project Manager for the Caribbean Hotel Energy Efficiency Action (CHENACT) Programme and Ujjwal Bhattacharjee, a specialist in renewable energy and energy efficiency with a focus on technology, investment and policy and a consultant on the CHENACT project.

The CHENACT Study found that green investments in the Caribbean hotel sector offers a sufficient critical mass to spur entrepreneurial activity and both Duffy-Mayers and Bhattacharjee expressed the hope that a Clean Energy Policy will be incorporated into the National Energy Policy of countries and replicated throughout the region

The forum was a partnership between the CTO and Invest Caribbean Now, the brand founded by Felicia Persaud, the Guyana-born CEO of the New York-based digital media company Hard Beat Communications.

Persaud, who co-convened and moderated the forum, urged the 100 delegates to remember that “investing in clean energy is not just environmentally responsible, but good business.”

“No region offers more long-term growth prospects for renewable energy than the Caribbean,” said Persaud.

Last year, according to the UN Environment Program, investors pumped a record two hundred and 11 billion US dollars into renewables globally and this is projected to grow to 1.7 trillion by 2020. Of the 211 billion, $72 billion was invested in developing countries vs. $70 billion in developed economies. South and Central America secured $13.1 billion of that amount. The Caribbean was not accounted for in this study.

“And so it is a challenge to the Caribbean region to position itself to take advantage of this new sector sustainably and with transparency. Our leaders must begin to think outside the box and be unafraid to move beyond the traditional sectors – for instance out of a dying sugar industry, to ethanol,” Persaud added. “We must tap investment into this sector to create new jobs and limit our dependence on the up and down prices of oil and grow our economies like our south American neighbors and really make a mark on this generation.”

The Caribbean Tourism Organization has been staging its Annual Conference on Sustainable Tourism Development, otherwise known as the Sustainable Tourism Conference (STC), since 1997. The 2012 conference was presented by the CTO and hosted by the Government of Guyana from April 15-18, 2012.

Partners for the April 18^th Green Investment forum included One Caribbean Television, CaribPR Wire and News Americas Now.