Building a climate resilient power sector in the context of the Caribbean small island developing States’ energy transition. Policy Brief

In Caribbean small island developing States (SIDS), electrical power outages are frequent in the aftermath of major weather events. While local service disruptions often last a few days after these events, nationwide power grid failures lasting several weeks, or months have resulted in enormous social and economic impacts. In 2017, Hurricane Maria left 90 per cent of the population of Dominica without access to electricity for over four months (Commonwealth of Dominica, 2020) and caused a systemwide collapse of Puerto Rico's power grid that took 11 months to be entirely restored (Campbell, 2018) (see map 1). In 2022, Puerto Rico was again left in the dark for several weeks after Hurricane Fiona's landfall (Lakhani, 2022). These events highlight the vulnerabilities of the subregion's power sector and demonstrate the lasting, compounding, and increasingly frequent impacts of extreme climate disasters in Caribbean SIDS.