2023-12-24 18:07:21
After remaining in operation for two years and having rusted for a dozen years on land, the Makemo wind turbines will be evacuated, like 130 tonnes of waste left by the Te Mau Ito Api “pilot project”. Cost of the operation: 40 million francs for the Country, which turns the page on a costly operation carried out at the initiative of Dominique Auroy’s Sdep. The island’s electricity concession has now been entrusted for 25 years to a subsidiary of EDT which must install a hybrid power plant on the former wind turbine site. Photovoltaic, this time.
It’s a page that is regarding to turn in Makemo, and not the brightest in the history of the atoll. By the middle of next year, waste from the old wind farm should have been removed from the Tuamotu island. Last week, the Polynesian Energy Directorate launched a public call for competition to find the service provider who will carry out this heavy task.
Heavy in the literal sense: six corpses of wind turbines, totaling 55 tonnes of masts, blades, generators, nacelles or stays, have been lying on the ground for a dozen years. In addition, in the technical rooms, transformers, inverters, various maintenance parts, generators and electric groups are now unusable, and above all 400 batteries still installed in their series support. 130 tonnes in total, including 37 of “sensitive industrial waste” and 77 others of scrap metal and metals, which the chosen company will have six months to evacuate and recycle, in Tahiti or New Zealand.
Fifteen years of hardship in Makemo
This project, long awaited by the inhabitants of Makemo, will be financed entirely with the country’s public funds, for a sum estimated, in the 2024 budget, at 40 million francs. A final expense for a “pilot project” which will have been costly from start to finish for the community. The company Te Mau Ito Api was created in 2006, with the capital Spres and Sedep of Dominique Auroy, major promoter of the project. The idea: to provide Makemo, whose power plant had burned a few years earlier, with a mixed thermal – wind power plant. A first in Polynesia and which was to prove that the model might be exported throughout the Tuamotus. The matter was agreed with the Country, which, a few months later, took two-thirds of the shares in the company, now “mixed economy” and granted a tax exemption of 100 million for the equipment.
The wind turbines were delivered at the end of 2007, and TMIA took control of the island’s electricity network at the beginning of the following year. From 2009, the wind turbines experienced technical problems: they will be definitively laid down in 2011. The causes are multiple and debated: lack of expertise and investment to ensure maintenance, insufficient from the start of the project, poor financial forecast, obligation to bill at the same price as in Tahiti… Losses are accumulating for the SEM, not helped, as the CTC notes, by the fact that the municipality is slow to pay it the electricity royalties – it will be condemned for that – and that Makemo cannot benefit from electricity equalization, then implemented only between EDT concessions.
165 million to modernize the network
Without a wind turbine, electricity production relies solely on thermal generators, and is punctuated by breakdowns and supply problems, when it is not voltage variations that cause the devices to “burn”. The finances of the SEM are even more unbalanced, and the Country, majority shareholder, is called upon several times to intervene. In 2016, the government no longer hides its desire to get rid of the company, the cost of which for public finances – of the Country, but also of the State – is then estimated at 387 million francs. Conciliation, debt recovery, and several legal proceedings later, the liquidation will finally be pronounced in 2019. In the meantime, vice-president Nuihau Laurey, like many others, denounced an “energy, legal, financial”. Dominique Auroy still believed in 2019, in a response letter to Tahiti infos, that the installations had proven that “wind power constituted a good alternative for the production of electricity in the Tuamotu”.
Since then, it is the energy department, which recently became the Polynesian Energy Directorate, which has directly managed electricity in Makemo. A unique situation in Polynesia, and all the more unprecedented as the municipality continues to manage production and distribution in Katiu, Taenga, Raroia and Takume. And the Country takes out the checkbook once more: a program to bring distribution up to standard at 165 million francs has been launched. But as the territorial chamber of accounts noted in 2021, the DPE’s only role was to provide interim relief following this “failure”. A first call for tenders to find a new electrical dealer finds no candidates. A second was delayed several times before being launched in 2022. Reforms to the regulatory framework for electricity – and in particular the establishment of country equalization – helped: a service provider was eventually found, in the middle of year 2023.
Five to find renewables
This is Énergie de Polynésie (EDP), a subsidiary of EDT-Engie created in 2021 precisely to position itself on the renewal of concessions in the islands. In charge since October 1, EDP is committed to extending the island’s network to unconnected homes, but above all to investing in a “renewable energy production unit”, which must cover, Within 5 years, half of the atoll’s electricity needs. A unit which must be installed, precisely on the land occupied by wind-generated waste. Engie has not yet communicated regarding its plans for Makemo, but one thing is certain: following all these years of relying on renewables, the atoll will instead rely on solar energy. The atoll, which was to be a pioneer, will ultimately be a little behind some of its neighbors in its conversion to renewable energy.
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