Washington D.C., October 16, 2012 – The annual Caribbean Renewable Energy Forum (CREF) is taking place from October 15 – 17, 2012 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This year’s theme is “The New Era: From Opportunity to Implementation”. Senior government officials, project developers, multilateral development organization representatives, commercial and investment bankers, and other stakeholder are gathered for three days to engage in high-level discussions and networking with the goal of contributing to increased transactions in the area of renewable energy.

On October 15^th, in advance of the full conference, the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States (GS/OAS) organized a side meeting to consider alternatives for electricity interconnections in the Caribbean Region. The meeting was linked to the Connecting the Americas 2022 and the ECPA Caribbean initiative under the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas (ECPA) framework. Puerto Rico’s Secretary of State, Kenneth McClintock opened the gathering by expressing his government’s commitment to working with neighboring island nations to build electricity linkages that will increase the region’s energy security while facilitating the transfer of lower cost renewable energy power supplies.

During the event, Minister Darcy Boyce from Barbados and Minister Rayburn Blackmoore from Dominica highlighted the importance of developing additional energy supplies from natural resources coming from within the region to offset some of the oil based electricity from imported resources that currently dominate the Caribbean energy portfolios. Ambassador Carlos Pascual, Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs, U.S. Department of State said, “interconnection in the Caribbean may help create larger, aggregated energy markets that make viable the development of large scale renewable energy projects such as geothermal and wind.”

The discussions highlighted key opportunities and challenges that delegates consider essential for consideration as multiple alternatives for interconnection are being evaluated. These highlights will be presented to the attendees of the full CREF conference on Wednesday October 17^th at the plenary panel that will conclude the event.

For more information, contact Alejandra Henao at ahenaop@oas.org, or visit www.ecpamericas.org.