By Dennis A. Minott, PhD September 28, 2026 For more than half a century, I have worked in and around renewable energy—hydroelectricity, biomass and solar—asking essentially the same Jamaican question: why should an island lavishly endowed with sunshine, wind, water, vegetation and human ingenuity remain chronically dependent on imported fuel? In Thunderclap 7, “Political Will Needed: The Arithmetic of Jamaica’s Energy Autonomy by 2031”, I argued that the answer is no longer

Jamaica should not become a tropical testing ground for an immature technology while immediate solutions—grid automation, rooftop solar, wind, biomass, microgrids, storage and energy efficiency—remain insufficiently pursued. Pause the spending. Publish the evidence. Answer the seven questions... Read More Online

A leader who voluntarily discloses, who invites independent audit, who answers hard questions without defensiveness, strengthens legitimacy. Transparency builds resilience. When scrutiny is welcomed rather than resisted, trust deepens. Conversely, when scrutiny is framed as hostility, when legitimate questions are dismissed as partisan attacks, polarisation intensifies. The public discourse coarsens.

Hurricane Melissa again revealed the cost of centralised fragility. But, distributed rooftop solar offers households resilience where transmission lines repeatedly fail. When households generate energy, they gain protection from outages, fuel price shocks, and rising living costs.