Jamaica’s Clean Energy Ambitions Hollowed Out by Seven Years of Policy Paralysis and a Mothballed Million-Dollar Plant

A 2017 performance audit by Auditor General Pamela Monroe Ellis found that Jamaica’s drive toward affordable, clean energy — a cornerstone of both the Vision 2030 national development plan and the country’s commitments at the United Nations — was being quietly undermined by years of bureaucratic inaction, contradictory government reporting, and the unexplained closure of a multimillion-dollar ethanol facility. For ordinary Jamaicans paying some of the highest electricity bills in the hemisphere, the findings reveal a system that built infrastructure with public money while failing to build the policy, governance, and accountability structures needed to make that infrastructure work.

In 2016, Jamaica commissioned four major energy projects within a single year: a 24-megawatt wind farm at Wigton costing US$45 million, a 36.8-megawatt Blue Mountain wind plant at US$89.7 million, a 20-megawatt solar photovoltaic installation at US$65 million, and a liquefied natural gas terminal in Montego Bay. On paper, these represented a country making serious, expensive moves toward energy diversification. In practice, according to a performance audit conducted by Auditor General Pamela Monroe Ellis and published in December 2017, those projects were being erected on a foundation riddled with policy gaps, governance failures, and accountability breaches that put the entire energy transition at risk.

The audit examined Jamaica’s progress toward Vision 2030 National Development Plan Outcome No. 10 — energy security and efficiency — and United Nations Sustainable Development Goal No. 7, which calls for affordable and clean energy for all. The entities under scrutiny were the Ministry of Science, Energy and Technology, the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica, and Petrojam Ethanol Limited, covering the five-year period from 2012 to 2017. What the Auditor General found was not a programme falling slightly short of ambitious targets. It was a programme operating without coherent direction, measuring its own performance in contradictory ways, and housing a failed subsidiary that had spent years incurring costs while producing nothing.

The most structurally damaging finding concerned five sub-policies that sit at the heart of any credible national energy strategy: policies covering renewable and alternative energy, biofuels, carbon emissions and trading, energy efficiency and conservation, and waste to energy. All five had been drafted by 2010. At the time of the audit, seven years later, not one had been finalized. No timeline had been set for their completion. The country had been making billion-dollar infrastructure decisions — and asking private investors to do the same — without the regulatory and strategic underpinning that such decisions require.

For Jamaican homeowners, businesses, and communities, this matters in concrete terms. Private investors considering renewable energy projects need policy certainty before committing capital. Without finalized policies on matters such as grid connection rules, feed-in tariffs, biofuel blending obligations, and carbon trading frameworks, the risk profile of investment increases. The audit explicitly identified policy uncertainty as a deterrent to private renewable energy investment — which means that every month those sub-policies sat in draft was a month in which Jamaica’s energy transition moved more slowly, and the country’s dependence on costly imported fossil fuels continued a day longer than necessary. Jamaicans who have watched electricity bills consume an outsized share of household income for decades have a direct stake in this failure.

The measurement problem uncovered by the audit adds a different kind of concern. When a government cannot accurately report what it is achieving, it cannot be held to account — and neither can it course-correct. The audit found that the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica and the Ministry of Science, Energy and Technology were simultaneously reporting different renewable energy figures for the same period. PCJ measured actual energy consumed and reported that renewables accounted for 8% of the national energy mix in 2014-15. MSET measured installed generation capacity and reported 12.5% — precisely the figure set as the target under the National Energy Policy. The ministry’s reporting, in other words, made it appear that the target had been met when the PCJ’s consumption-based measure suggested otherwise.

Beyond the renewable energy percentage, the audit found no tracking whatsoever of energy intensity — how much energy the economy uses per unit of output — and no monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions. This is not a minor administrative gap. At the 2015 United Nations climate conference in Paris, Jamaica made formal commitments to reduce its carbon footprint and transition to a cleaner energy mix. Those commitments require credible data. Without it, Jamaica cannot accurately report to international bodies, cannot measure whether climate policies are working, and cannot make evidence-based decisions about where to focus public investment. Farmers facing increasingly erratic rainfall patterns, coastal communities watching sea levels creep closer, and the tourism industry on which so many livelihoods depend all have reason to care whether Jamaica’s climate commitments are backed by real numbers.

The audit’s examination of governance architecture revealed a structure that existed largely on paper. The Jamaica Energy Council, established by Cabinet in 2012 with a mandate to provide high-level coordination across government on energy matters, had met once — in May 2012, the month of its creation — with no subsequent meetings documented over the following five years. An inter-ministry Joint Task Force formed three years earlier, in 2009, to coordinate biofuels policy and land use planning between the energy ministry and the Ministry of Agriculture, had made no measurable progress in the eight years since its formation. These are not bodies that lacked a mandate. They lacked the functional management oversight required to make them operate.

The consequences for Jamaica’s biofuel programme were direct and costly. National energy policy, in force since 2009, required a ten-percent ethanol blend in petrol — the E10 mandate — using locally produced ethanol. Petrojam Ethanol Limited was the state entity built to supply that ethanol. Its production plant, constructed in 2005 at a cost of US$9.3 million — equivalent to approximately JMD$823 million — was closed in August 2013. Four years later, when the Auditor General’s team arrived, it remained shut. No approved corporate plan existed. No operational plan existed. No economic justification had been provided for the decision to cease production. No timeline for reopening had been established. The plant that was supposed to deliver Jamaica’s domestic ethanol supply — and reduce the foreign exchange drain of importing fossil fuels — had simply been locked and left.

Inside the plant, the neglect was quantifiable. Three of PEL’s five ethanol storage tanks contained approximately 4,000 barrels of contaminated ethanol that had been sitting unused since 2016, with an estimated value of JMD$62 million. The audit reviewed eight ethanol purchase transactions conducted between April 2014 and June 2017, representing total expenditure of roughly JMD$39.3 million. Three-quarters of those transactions were missing the quality certificates required when ethanol was discharged into storage tanks. More than six in ten lacked laboratory reports that should have accompanied customer deliveries. The public was spending tens of millions of dollars on a product that was neither properly tested on arrival nor properly documented on departure.

Perhaps most striking was the staffing reality at a plant that was not operating. PEL maintained nine production staff on its payroll despite generating no production output. The organisation was not simply waiting for a restart signal — it was actively recruiting replacements for departing production staff. Public money was being spent to maintain and expand a workforce for a facility with no approved plan to reopen, no approved corporate strategy, and no Board-approved corporate plan for the 2015-2018 period. The plan had been drafted; the Board had simply never approved it.

The accountability failures extended beyond the plant itself. Under the Public Bodies Management and Accountability Act, statutory bodies are required to operate with agreed measurable objectives, submit quarterly performance reports to their parent ministry, and file bi-annual reports with the Ministry of Finance. PEL had done none of these things. No agreed objectives. No quarterly reports. No bi-annual reports. The audit found that PCJ, as PEL’s parent company, had provided inadequate oversight — leaving a subsidiary that had spent years in a state of operational suspension to operate without any of the management controls that Jamaican law requires of public bodies.

The root causes identified by the Auditor General were systemic rather than individual. Weak linkages across government departments meant that no single entity felt clear ownership of critical coordination functions. Confusion over which agency bore responsibility for measuring national energy performance metrics meant that measurement fell through the cracks between institutions. The absence of a long-term feedstock supply strategy — the agricultural planning required to underpin a viable biofuel programme — reflected the broader failure of the Joint Task Force between energy and agriculture ministries to translate its mandate into action. These are failures of institutional design and management accountability, not isolated lapses.

MSET’s response, submitted in October 2017, acknowledged that the five sub-policies remained in draft form and stated that its newly constituted Policy Division had been tasked with finalizing them. No specific completion date was offered. The Auditor General recommended that the ministry finalize the sub-policies, establish a clear coordinated strategic direction for renewable energy development, and provide definitive direction on PEL’s future — whether that meant a funded plan to restart operations or a managed decision to wind the entity down. Without one or the other, public assets would continue to depreciate and public funds continue to be spent on an organisation without a purpose.

What this audit ultimately documents is the gap between Jamaica’s stated energy ambitions and its administrative capacity to deliver them. The country spent hundreds of millions of dollars on wind farms, solar arrays, and an LNG terminal. Those investments are real and their contribution to the grid is tangible. But alongside them sat a governance vacuum: policies never finalized, a council that never met, a plant that never reopened, data that contradicted itself, and a subsidiary that operated outside every accountability requirement the law imposed. For the Jamaican public — paying electricity bills, breathing air shaped by the country’s energy choices, and contributing taxes to fund these institutions — the audit makes clear that physical infrastructure, however impressive, cannot substitute for the administrative discipline and policy coherence that a genuine energy transition requires.

Jamaica Accountability Watch is an independent editorial series by Jamaica Homes News examining what government audit reports reveal about the management of public money. Source: Auditor General’s Department of Jamaica.

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