STAKEHOLDERS in the renewable energy sector are demanding answers from the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS) and the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) about the suspension of the light and power company’s net billing programme.

David Barrett, president of the Jamaica Solar Energy Association (JSEA), chided the JPS for what he said was the sudden suspension of the programme and turning down new applications “abruptly and without proper notice to stakeholders, businesses, and residential customers”.

Barrett argued that the suspension has put a halt on all grid interconnection for new net billing projects islandwide, and likely to cause tens of millions of dollars in losses for the renewable energy sector.

The association said it was baffled by the move as over the past three-and-a-half years, it has met with the JPS, the Ministry of Science, Technology, Energy and Mining, and the OUR on numerous occasions to “discuss and agree on best practices for the interconnection process and the most effective manner to move the industry forward”.

Barrett said, too, that the two-year pilot programme, which was extended for an additional year, was to have simply continued into a second phase.

In the meantime, the JPS said that while there was no plan to toss the progamme, the suspension was necessary in order to review its status.

“The programme ran the two years [of the pilot], starting in 2012, in keeping with the OUR determination… we ran it for an additional year to May 2015 [and] we did notify the OUR that we would have been ending the pilot. The idea behind that is to review the pilot to see what we can learn from it in order to have a new net billing programme, which will be taking into consideration all the elements,” JPS Corporate Communications Officer Audrey Williams explained in a Jamaica Observer interview.

She noted that the results of the review, which is being undertaken by the United States National Renewable Energy Laboratory with the support of the United States Agency for International Development, will be made public. “At that time we will all hear what has come out of the programme,” she said.

Williams, at the same time, said the JPS also has concerns about some aspects of the pilot, including how it affected the stability of the system. She explained that: “Electricity, unlike water which can be stored, cannot be generated and stored in that strict sense… [so] our power plants don’t generate electricity unless there is a demand. What happens (with renewables) is that if, for example, somebody has a large solar plant and we put it on (to the JPS system), immediately, that amount of demand disappears, so our plant would need to ease down in terms of production, and when that solar plant goes down (because of lack of sunlight), our plants will have to ramp up quickly to meet the demand that they now have. The speed with which the unit (plant) can do that depends on the size, and so on. Our unit wasn’t meant to ramp up and down throughout the day in that kind of way. This can actually cause distress on the unit.”

She pointed out that this type of fluctuation can, for example, force the JPS to carry out load-shedding.

Williams said the JPS, therefore, needed an integrated resource plan to manage that type of fluctuation in demand. “It needs to be planned properly. If you don’t plan it properly, then you’re going to have units getting into trouble,” she stated.

In the meantime, she said the JPS would continue to honour its current netbilling arrangements, and is still processing applications that are pending.

Since the start of the pilot the company has received a total of 366 applicants, of which 300 have received licences. However, only 128 applicants have submitted the required documentation and payments required for further processing. Williams said the remainder are pending, or awaiting outstanding documents.

The JSEA said it was also upset at what it termed “the regulator’s silence on the matter”. However, when contacted, the OUR said it did not yet have a response to the issues raised by the association.

According to the JPS, the regulator is expected to publicise the results of the review of the pilot at a symposium scheduled for May 28.

Net billing allows residential and commercial JPS customers with renewable energy generators to produce electricity for personal use. They can also sell excess energy to the company at wholesale prices set by the OUR.