Digicel Jamaica’s latest multimillion-dollar investment in solar power is not about raising customer rates but about protecting revenues by keeping services running when the grid fails, according to the company’s chief executive.

Stephen Murad, CEO of Digicel Jamaica, said the 12-month project with US-based Caban Energy is aimed squarely at ensuring continuity of service across all parishes — whether during a hurricane, a Jamaica Public Service (JPS) outage, or even something as ordinary as a road crash.

“So think of it as a different way. This isn’t a straight pass through to an individual or business customer, it’s not about that,” Murad told the Jamaica Observer.

“This is about making sure we’ve got continuity of service, so you have a one-to-one relationship with Digicel. It’s about making sure that relationship doesn’t break in a natural disaster, in an incident of JPS or an incident where a taxi decides to bring its front end into a pole and take down the pole, which happens every single day.”

The roll-out, which began earlier this month, involves installing solar and battery systems at 511 of Digicel’s 930 sites, with crews working on 30 to 40 sites per month. CEO of Caban Energy, Alexandra Rasch, said roughly 180 people are engaged in the project locally, from logistics and finance to construction.

“It has started in Jamaica already and we’re doing roughly about 30 sites per month, 30 to 40 sites per month depending on their location, all parishes at the same time,” Rasch told the Business Observer.

“We have probably 180 people working on this project and that’s everywhere, from logistics, purchasing, finance, construction, etc.”

The company has also widened the scope beyond towers. Digicel’s headquarters downtown and its data centres are being solarised too — facilities that carry critical traffic across the region.

“One of the things that wasn’t mentioned today, and it’s important to mention, is we are doing Digicel’s headquarter offices and then their data centres as well. So we have not just the cell sites, but they’re much bigger locations that are coming also next,” Rasch explained.

Murad said the investment, which he described only as “multimillions of US dollars,” is part of a wider programme of technology upgrades, including new fibre builds in Montego Bay earlier this year.

The Jamaican project is the first of its kind for Digicel, but Murad confirmed that other markets are already lining up.

“Haiti have already started their projects as well, TCI, Cayman Islands, Dominica, St Lucian, St Vincent and the Grenadines, ABC, so all of those markets are here today to come and have a look at what Jamaica is doing, because they are going next,” he said.

Digicel operates across 25 markets in the Caribbean, Central America, and the Pacific, serving close to nine million customers through mobile, home, and business services. Its largest operations are in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Haiti, but the group also has a strong presence in smaller island states such as Barbados, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, the Cayman Islands, and Turks and Caicos.