A $38.5 Million Bill and a 30-Megawatt Dream: Nevis Confronts the Cost of Its Own Power

Premier Mark Brantley told the Assembly the island's administration owes its electric utility tens of millions, even as he pitches Nevis abroad as a geothermal pioneer.

Premier Mark Brantley told the Nevis Island Assembly that the Nevis Island Administration's cumulative debt to the electricity utility NEVLEC stood at 38.5 million dollars as of August 31, according to the Ministry of Finance, while NEVLEC's own records show roughly 24 million dollars more than that (Nevis Island Administration, mid-October). 'There has to be a reconciliation done,' Brantley said. He explained that the administration has paid about 500,000 dollars a month to NEVLEC since 2022, and suggested the utility appeared to credit those payments only against the fuel surcharge rather than the principal, raising the question in response to Opposition member Dr. Janice Daniel Hodge.

The dispute is small in dollar terms by the standards of larger economies and enormous in the context of Nevis, an island of around 11,000 people whose public finances have little room for a multimillion-dollar discrepancy with its own power company. A debt that two arms of the same small state cannot even agree on the size of is a governance problem before it is a financial one. Until the reconciliation Brantley called for is done, no one can say with confidence what the administration actually owes, which makes it impossible to budget around.

The irony is that Nevis is simultaneously trying to solve the deeper problem the NEVLEC bill represents, which is the crushing cost of making electricity from imported diesel. Brantley addressed the Caribbean Renewable Energy Forum in Panama, urging Caribbean energy independence and pointing to Nevis's long-planned 30-megawatt geothermal plant (Nevis Island Administration, October 15). Nevis sits atop genuine geothermal resource, heat beneath the volcanic island that could, if harnessed, free it from diesel entirely and even let it export power to neighboring St. Kitts by cable. The project has been promised for years and repeatedly delayed, the perennial gap between a small island's green ambition and its ability to finance and build a complex plant.

The two stories are the same story. The reason the administration owes NEVLEC tens of millions is, at root, that power is expensive, and power is expensive because it is made from fuel the island must buy in hard currency on a volatile market. Geothermal is the escape, in theory, a domestic, renewable, baseload source that would end the diesel dependence and the fuel surcharges that are now entangled in the very debt dispute before the Assembly. The challenge is getting from the resource in the ground to the electrons on the grid, which requires drilling, capital and partners, and which has defeated the timeline more than once.

Around the energy debate, the island kept up a busy civic week. Acting Premier Eric Evelyn welcomed about 80 delegates to the first Carib Brewery Distributor Conference held outside Trinidad and Tobago, at the Sunshine Beach Bar and Grill, and the island hosted the first Good Deeds Day Caribbean Conference in St. Kitts and Nevis (Nevis Island Administration, October 15). For a jurisdiction this small, hosting regional gatherings is a form of economic development in itself. But the number that will define the next budget is the one still in dispute, that 38.5 million dollar figure, and the project that could eventually render it moot remains, for now, a 30-megawatt promise rather than a plant.