Rolando González Bunster: “CEPM guarantees the stability and security necessary for a sustainable energy transition”.

• During his participation in the Mercado Energy Summit, the president and CEO of InterEnergy Group, shared the experience of this leading energy group in the region on the road to decarbonization by 2030, highlighting the key role of clean energy mix for a sustainable energy transition.
• As part of its CEPM Zero program, this company will convert the eastern part of the country into the first zero-emission tourist destination, mobilized with electric vehicles and 100% clean energy from solar, wind, pumped hydro and green hydrogen.

Santo Domingo, June 30, 2023. On the road to zero emissions, the key to guaranteeing system stability and continuous, quality energy service is the combination of different energies and a solid storage infrastructure. This was stated by Rolando González Bunster, president and CEO of InterEnergy Group, during his participation in the Mercado Energy Summit, organized by Revista Mercado.

From the central theme of his speech, “Leading the change towards zero emissions”, González Bunster emphasized: “Our plan is to change from oil to gas and move steadily towards renewables. The key is the perfect combination to guarantee the energy transition to which the world aspires”.

The path of this leading energy group, in its more than thirty years of history in the country, has been oriented towards the generation of an increasingly cleaner future; and that north, ever closer, has a name: CEPM Zero.

It was during the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), held in Glasgow in 2021, that the president of InterEnergy Group announced the plan to make CEPM a 100% renewable company by 2030, under the CEPM Zero initiative. “When I made this announcement I did not realize the complexity and magnitude of this project – confessed González Bunster – but this commitment is now a reality, and we will install 700 MW of renewable energy in the CEPM concession area and another 100 outside this area.”

The challenge on this path, as the businessman indicated, is to overcome the intermittency of renewable energies, when the natural resource, whether wind, water or sun, is not available, for which it is necessary to create a “sufficiently reliable and robust” storage infrastructure to guarantee the stability of the system. “And that requires investment. Whoever thinks that renewable energy is cheap has to consider that for it to be reliable it must have a lot of additives,” reminded the president of InterEnergy Group.

“Renewable energy represents in kW installed a significant percentage of the country’s generation, but not in kW produced, so we have to take into account how to supplement renewable energy with enough batteries for that energy to operate the most hours per day,” he completed.

Accelerating a zero-emission future

In this sense, CEPM, as an isolated system, can guarantee this balance, determining the combination and investment necessary to achieve this objective. “We want to make the eastern tourist area a zero emissions destination, from Casa de Campo to Miches, where tourists can travel with electric cars, charge them with solar energy, travel to Saona Island on the first electric catamaran in the country… That is our route.“explained González Bunster.

From this vision, since last December, Saona has had a photovoltaic plant that provides clean energy to the more than 600 inhabitants of this island for the first time in its history, from a model of sustainability that can be replicated in other parts of the world. This plan is part of the Sustainable Saona project, carried out in alliance with the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (MIMARENA) to make this destination, which receives more than 1 million tourists per year, a model worldwide.

According to González Bunster, InterEnergy Group’s short-term plans are ambitious for the zero-emission future that the group aspires to achieve, with a regional scope. In 2024, it will inaugurate in Panama the largest combined cycle plant in Central America and the Caribbean, in partnership with AES; in addition to the unstoppable expansion of Evergo with the largest and most sophisticated network of charging stations in the region, already present in more than a dozen countries.