Hotel Sector Waits for Government to Submit SIDS Dock Proposal

When the Grenada Hotel and Tourism Association began the journey to become the first Zero Carbon Hotel Sector in the region, a mechanism called 'SIDSdock' had been identified as a possible funding source.

The term SIDS refers to small island developing states, and if you live on one, it's a term you hear a lot. If you don't live on one, chances are it's a term you've never heard of before. The SIDS grouping blossumed as a leading advocacy grouping of countries who would be most affected by climate change. Grenada is a small island developing state that will be profoundly affected by climate change, but thanks to our mountains we'll still have an island(s) as sea levels rise - other flat, low lying islands might not be so lucky as to look forward to a continued existence.

How is this related to the Hotels waiting for the government to submit their proposal? Well, SIDS Dock was a funding mechanism developed specifically for financing climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies and the hotels zero carbon goal fits in quite nicely with that. The problem is that there are limited funds that all the SIDS are competing for (or at least those who are efficient enough to get projects designed and proposals put together) and Grenada's already got a proposal in queue! Not submitted by us, but by government. And not surprisingly, the first version of the Hotels SIDS proposal given to government to submit to SIDSDock in mid-July hasn't gone anywhere.

Is there enough money for the government and the private sector of one country to have their proposals financed? I don't know. Should a funding mechanism like this evolve into government and non-governmental streams? Probably.

In the meantime however, I took out the solar farm component of our project at the end of August because it was a) the most expensive part and b) required more negotiations with the local utility (I will blog about this another time). So the USD $2 million request was reduced to USD $500,000 and solar farm (Community energy) component that would have required Memorandums of Understanding and Agreements with the Government and GRENLEC were removed.

The project is now a 100% self contained project that doesn't require agreements, MOU's, partnerships or anything else that could hold things up. It's a simple project involving Energy Audits and Energy Conservation/Efficiency retrofits that could reduce electricity consumption by as much as half (OMG - that's a lot!).

There's an approximate deadline of 'September' to get that proposal officially submitted. I don't know if our proposal made it to Cabinet for review yesterday, but since the government decided to prorogue government yesterday - I doubt it. So it's pretty safe to assume the proposal won't be going anywhere this week. Next week maybe?