(Jamaica Gleaner) Renew-able energy firm Naanovo, in partnership with a Jamaican company, plans to setup a power plant at Riverton City that will convert garbage into electricity, state investment agency Jampro told Sunday Business.
The project is expected to cost at least J$12 billion.
The waste-to-energy project, will be headed by Anthony Fiddy, Managing Director of Naanovo UK, and Jamaican businessman Mark Dennis and his family, the agency said.
“We have formed the company and I have had meetings with all the relevant parties and they have all agreed to support the project. It’s now a question of putting the project together,” Fiddy reportedly said Wednesday at one of the trade and investment forums hosted by Jampro at Jamaica House in North Greenwich Arena, London.
The power plant will be set up under a Build, Own, Operate and Transfer (BOOT) agreement, and transferred to the government after 25 years.
Fiddy said at the forum that the project could mean an investment of “US$140 million to US$180 million” (J$12.6b to J$16.2b), employing about 300 people during the construction phase and about 250 once operational. The land for the plant has been identified just west of the landfill site at Riverton in Kingston.
Efforts to reach him for further comment were unsuccessful.
Naanovo, a global clean energy company with roots in Canada, began in 2001 circling the globe looking for project opportunities. The company now operates in about 10 territories spread across Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe.
Jamaica aims to have 20 per cent of its energy mix from renewables by 2030. It’s not the first waste-to-energy plant slated for the Riverton City disposal site and environs. In 2009, a memorandum of understanding was signed between the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica (PCJ) and Cambridge Project Development and its partners for the establishment of two waste-to-energy plants using new technologies to generate up to 65 MW of electricity from garbage at the Riverton dump in Kingston, according to the energy ministry in its National Energy from Waste Policy 2010-2030.
They are yet to be constructed.
The two waste-to-energy plants were slated to save some US$60 million in the fuel importation bill, annually.
