Dear Franklin,

Your four-sentence remark asking whether Jamaica still needs a grid operated by a single monopoly could not be more timely. 

Hurricane Melissa has exposed, with clinical precision, the fragility of our present electricity system and the steep cost of depending on one operator for national resilience. You asked for alternatives in simple, clear English. The answer lies not in abstract theory, but in our own lived history and in the systems Jamaicans have quietly operated for more than a century.

Jamaica no longer needs a monopoly grid when modern technology allows communities, businesses, and even households to generate, store, and share their own clean power. A decentralised network built on micro-grids and renewable resources—solar, wind, biomass, hydro, and hybrid systems—offers resilience no monopoly can match.

Distributed systems can continue to operate when the national grid fails, a reality Melissa reminded us of in painful detail—exactly one month ago. What we need today is not the JPS grid, but a Jamaican grid: plural, diversified, storm-resistant, and fully aligned with the future.

This is not a theoretical proposition. It is already happening within our borders. The Norman Manley International Airport has developed its own hybrid microgrid, soon to run largely on solar. The Rockfort-based Caribbean Cement Company has operated its independent system for years.

The Ewarton Alumina Works functions as a full microgrid, serving both internal operations and off-site company facilities within St Catherine and parts of St Ann. These are neither boutique nor Mickey-Mouse experiments; they are industrial-scale demonstrations of what a distributed energy future can look like.

The sugar industry’s legacy provides an even older blueprint. At Monymusk, Tim Scarlett ran a fully renewable microgrid on bagasse and barbojo for years. It powered the estate’s wells, major machinery, worker housing, and several off-site operations. Frome, Duckenfield, Long Pond, Sevens, Bernard Lodge, Hampden, Appleton, and Worthy Park all operated similar systems across the sugar belt. These were functional, reliable, Jamaican-built and Jamaican-managed energy islands—microgrids long before we used the term. My son Stefan’s graduate engineering thesis at Cornell later read like a continuation of this tradition, outlining practices that have since become commonplace in countries north and east of us.

Long before any of this, Jamaica understood the practical value of decentralisation. For much of my childhood, the parish of Portland was served by a separate 40-Hz microgrid managed by my godfather and exemplar, Gilly Pottinger. It quietly kept the whole parish powered and reminded us that a national monopoly is not the only way to run a country’s electricity system. Come to think of it, the St Elizabethan town of Black River hosted Jamaica’s very first mini-grid.

The history runs even deeper. My maternal grandmother, Mable Moorehouse-Maylor, frequently urged me to take note of the old, rotted penstock in the Rio Cobre Gorge—the very water conduit that once powered the hydropower station supplying electricity to Kingston’s tram system, 20 miles (or 34 km) by road. That St Catherine-based mini-grid lit Kingston, moved its workers, and sustained the Jamaica Gleaner’s former printery, Machado’s operations, and the Kingston Ice Factory. It was clean, green, and locally managed.

But history also records the June 24, 1904, Bog Walk tragedy, often cited as Jamaica’s worst industrial accident. Contemporary Gleaner reports and later reconstructions, agree that 33 workers died when water was mistakenly released into the massive penstock during cleaning operations. Of some 60 to 80 men in the pipe, only 17 survived by escaping through a manhole. 

The horror of that event cast a long shadow and may have dampened Jamaican enthusiasm for hydro-based decentralised systems for decades. My grandmother was still shaken by those stories, and even in my own professional work with hydropower here and overseas, I would sometimes detect her residual fear.

Other micro-grids thrived elsewhere. Surge Island Dairies Ltd used to power its farms and facilities entirely from a turbine generator installed below a dam, now fashionably known as Reggae Falls—an MHG generating system I helped refurbish four decades ago with Canadian assistance. That west St Thomas generator, once a model of rural energy autonomy, is now rumoured to be mothballed—again. My visionary friend ‘Zackie’ Matalon must be mighty ruffled by this post-mortem development.

Even during the 1980s, decentralised resilience proved its worth. After Hurricane Gilbert, the ENERPLAN facilities at Munroe Road were occasionally powered entirely by their own Leucaena-fuelled ENERGAS system. I recall Father Ho-Lung of the Missionaries of the Poor asking whether we might supply “over-the-fence” electricity to neighbours. But Engineer Dawkins of the Rural Electrification Programme cautioned us, noting—correctly—that the JPS licence would likely block such a move. That moment captured the central tension we still face today: Jamaica has the creativity and the technology, but the regulatory framework remains chained to a bygone era.

The alternatives are therefore neither speculative nor imported. They are Jamaican. They are proven. They are resilient. And they are needed now more than ever.

A decentralised energy system built on micro-grids offers several advantages. First, it improves resilience by limiting the scale of any failure; a storm may damage one system, but it cannot black out an entire island. Second, it encourages innovation and competition, lowering costs and improving service. Third, it promotes energy self-sufficiency, empowering communities and reducing our exposure to external shocks. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, post-Melissa, it creates a system in which reliability is earned through performance, not granted by monopoly.

We should not cling to a model that leaves our hospitals, schools, communications networks, and households in prolonged darkness whenever the central grid collapses. Melissa showed us that distributed micro-grids kept pockets of Jamaica alive while the national system struggled to recover. That lesson must not be wasted.

Franklin, your question goes to the heart of Jamaica’s reconstruction and long-term security. Our task is not to dismantle the grid; it is to reshape it into a system where central generation and distributed micro-grids coexist, complement, and reinforce one another. A modern Jamaica deserves an open, intelligent, and plural energy marketplace where resilience, affordability, and innovation—not monopoly privilege—determine who keeps the lights on.

Thank you for the benefit of your time and for your enduring service to Jamaica and the wider Caribbean.

Respectfully,
Dennis A. Minott