Niue aims for 80 percent renewable energy by 2025

Transcript

Niue is seeking approximately 18.3 million US dollars to build a solar farm as part of the island nation's plans to reduce its heavy reliance on fossil fuels.

The minister for infrastructure, Dalton Tagelagi, says Niue's strategic energy road map sets the ambitious goal of having 80 percent of its power generation coming from renewable energy sources by 2025.

He spoke with Koroi Hawkins about the new strategy.

DALTON TAGELAGI: It's a working document, its aspirations are our forward planning for the next ten years regarding energy. And how we can save from fossil fuels as you are probably aware our electricity energy here is heavily reliant on fossil fuel at the moment. So we are hoping in ten years time that we will be at least 80 percent will be renewable energy and so on and so forth.

KOROI HAWKINS: And there are several sources of renewable energy, which one is Niue leaning towards more?

DT: Well at the moment solar panels from the sun that is the only one we are looking at or planning for at the moment.

KH: And do we have an idea how much money is required for the plans?

DT: Well it varies, I think the big one in there that we are looking for is about 28 million dollars. So this will be like a solar farm and that is the big costing of course it will be installing of solar panels and so forth. There is quite a range of how we can save or be less dependent on fuel.

KH: And have donor partners already committed to this or are you still in talks with bilateral partners multilateral partners for assistance with this?

DT: That is right these documents or this roadmap will also help that, our application or our regress for donors, the document really is to show what we wanted to achieve then also shows the amount of money to achieve those projects. Really it is a guiding document, this is what we wanted to do and not only donors but the rest of the money also from our government our own contributions to it. There is quite a few little projects in there that are say 20000 and up to a 100,000 but bigger, bigger projects captured in there and from there we can use that as our tool when we applied for funds and so forth.

KH: Now 80 percent is quite and ambitious target do you think it is achievable, and why is it important that you achieve this?

DT: You always set yourself a target and try and achieve it. Not everything is achievable 100 percent but if we can at least 50 percent we will be, that will be a great achievement.

KH: And why is it important?

DT: Well it is very important because of the cost of importing the fossil fuel, it will be good for the environment and everything else but mainly it is the cost and reliance of the fossil fuel that we wanted to cut down.