With the most recent, seemingly inexplicable islandwide blackout still fresh in the collective memory, we sincerely doubt if many would oppose Dr. Paul Campbell's suggestion that the Jamaica Public Service Company's monopoly be broken, as reported in yesterday's Gleaner.

In fact, we sincerely doubt that this is a groundbreaking notion Dr. Campbell's position as research co-ordinator in the Faculty of Engineering and Computing at the University of Technology (UTech) gives it the requisite weight for serious consideration.

What should really send a tingle through the public, though, is his call for a change in the policy on net metering. As he said, "net metering is a policy in which customers of the power utility are given the option to produce power on their own facilities on the understanding that if they produce excess power - which is more than they need - that excess power can be sent to the national electricity grid and the customer is compensated; but it is not profitable."

Dr. Campbell proposed that persons should be able to sell the electricity to whomever they liked or that their compensation should be increased.

Jamaica has two inexhaustible sources of potential energy, the wind and the sun. While generating electricity from the wind requires significant infrastructure, an investment which has been made at Munro College in St. Elizabeth and Wigton in Manchester, solar power is more easily available to all. Currently, usage is restricted mostly to heating water, with many new housing developments offering solar water heaters as standard equipment.

Encouraging expansion into not only the independence of providing electricity for wider household usage, but also into profit-making by providing electricity for the national grid, would no doubt significantly reduce the nation's oil dependence and exposure to price hikes.

Ironically Jamaica and other tropical countries have the advantage of abundant sunshine, it is in Germany that utilisation of solar power by households and the sale of excess electricity into the public supply has taken off. Germany is not, after all, known for its sunny climes, but the intention is to develop and fine-tune the technology so that it becomes a supplier of the necessary equipment in what is predicted to be a boom market to countries like Jamaica, if Dr. Campbell's proposal were to be taken seriously and implemented.

Jamaica simply has too much sunshine to be susceptible to be almost totally dependent on oil for electricity, and hence be susceptible to the vagaries of the market, especially with the Middle East seeming set to go through continuous crises for some time to come.

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