Description

Haiti scored 0.73, ranking it 45th out of the 55 nations surveyed for Climatescope 2014. Among the 26 Latin American and Caribbean countries, it ranked 20th.

The nation relies on power plants fuelled by imported oil for 77% of its total 295MW installed capacity. Local utilities face numerous challenges, including intermittent supply of electricity due to poor infrastructure and the lack of an energy regulation framework to set up and enforce rules and quality standards.

Only 28% of the 10.3m population has grid access, the lowest electrification rate in Latin America. As a result, most Haitians use fossil fuels such as kerosene and diesel to run distributed applications for electricity. For cooking, charcoal is used by 72% of the population. Haiti has considerable clean energy potential, but so far has just one hydro plant (54MW), which represents some 19% of national generating capacity, along with other mini-hydro plants which amount to 7MW.

Since the 2010 earthquake, most activity related to clean energy in Haiti has been sponsored by multilateral agencies and non-profit organizations in a bid to re-establish the country’s power sector. This is reflected in the country’s significant progress on solar off-grid initiatives. In 2014, Haiti was included in Climatescope’s ‘off-grid’ methodology, which takes into account its off-grid value chain and awards higher scores for off-gridrelated indicators.