The vol­ume of nat­ur­al gas used in the gen­er­a­tion of elec­tric­i­ty in Trinidad & To­ba­go varies from day to day.

The vol­ume of gas used de­pends on two main fac­tors:

• ↓First­ly, it de­pends on the weath­er; on hot­ter days there is more de­mand for elec­tric­i­ty for air con­di­tion­ing and there­fore more gas is burnt to gen­er­ate that elec­tric­i­ty;

• Sec­ond­ly, the vol­ume of gas used de­pends on how much elec­tric­i­ty comes from the more ef­fi­cient elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tion units and how much comes from the less ef­fi­cient gen­er­a­tion units. The most ef­fi­cient gen­er­a­tion is from the com­bined cy­cle sys­tems at the TGU (Trinidad Gen­er­a­tion Un­lim­it­ed) plant in La Brea and the Pow­er­gen plant in Pe­nal. If there are is­sues with these plants, more elec­tric­i­ty has to be dis­patched from the less ef­fi­cient sin­gle cy­cle units in Point Lisas.

The vari­a­tion can be more than 50 mil­lion cu­bic feet of gas per day (mm­scf/d). This vol­ume of gas could run a typ­i­cal medi­um-sized petro­chem­i­cal plant. If the vol­ume of gas used is kept at the low­er end of what is typ­i­cal­ly used we could have an ad­di­tion­al plant run­ning in Point Lisas. This would mean high­er ex­ports, more for­eign ex­change, more Gov­ern­ment rev­enue and ad­di­tion­al se­cure jobs.

While we can­not con­trol the weath­er, we can con­trol both en­er­gy con­sump­tion through bet­ter more ef­fi­cient cool­ing sys­tems and through en­sur­ing more ef­fi­cient elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tion, in ad­di­tion to the in­tro­duc­tion of re­new­able en­er­gy. These can be in­flu­enced by the right poli­cies and pro­grammes.