If irony generated electricity, Berbice wouldn’t need a second gas pipeline. Only months after helping to broker an MoU between our Government under Pressie’s leadership and Cerebras Systems for a proposed 300MW artificial intelligence (AI) data centre in Berbice, Ernst & Young (EY) is now organising another data centre initiative – this time in Kamla’s Trinidad and Tobago. Talk about hedging your bets!!
The juxtaposition is difficult to ignore. One moment, Berbice is being boosted as the future home of cutting-edge AI infrastructure for our region. Next, EY is helping position Trinidad to fill the same role!! Now, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong about that; EY’s a global consultancy firm – not Guyana’s economic development agency. Its job is to create business opportunities – and make money for themselves!! – wherever they exist. But Guyana’s policymakers should be asking whether the Guyanese fella heading up EY’s AI forays ain’t playing both sides against the middle!!
Data centres are among the world’s most energy-intensive facilities. They demand abundant, reliable and competitively priced electricity – not to mention water for cooling. That’s precisely why the proposed Cerebras project was strategically important. It offered a potential anchor customer to justify Exxon landing that second gate-to-shore pipeline for industrial-scale power generation in Berbice!! But if Trinidad snags the regional data centre ecosystem instead, we’ll be left in the lurch!! Pipelines follow demand. Investors follow customers. They don’t follow press releases!!
The uncomfortable truth is that an MOU ain’t no investment decision!! It’s just an agreement to explore “possibilities”!! Have we tied down the “possibilities” into “probabilities” since the signing?? Your Eyewitness certainly hopes so!! ‘Cause Berbice needs that jump start that a GTS-initiated industrialisation project would provide!! Meanwhile, Trinidad, under Kamla, desperately trying to regain its mojo, continues to leverage its industrial infrastructure, established utilities and decades of experience servicing multinational energy companies. They may not have our breakneck economic growth, but they’ve got experience with gas-fired power plants!! 750 MW of it – which would soon be fed from the new Dragon Mouth field the Yanks are arranging via Venezuela!! So until construction of the Cerebras project begins, we gotta resist the temptation to confuse ambition with achievement.
Now, there’s a certain poetic symmetry in EY facilitating both “possibilities”. Consultants, after all – especially if Guyanese are involved – don’t owe no loyalty to geography; their loyalty is to make a buck! Even more than countries, consultants got no eternal friends – just eternal interests in making money!! The question is whether we’re creating enough real opportunities to keep Berbice ahead in the race with the electricity demand that was supposed to justify that second gas pipeline.
Because in the digital economy, nobody remembers who signed the first memorandum. They’ll remember who opened the first data centre!!
…sovereignty
Your Eyewitness saw a very disturbing news item about a band of armed Chinese in military gear deployed in Suriname’s interior!! Some were in the country legally and some not!! They were arrested, and hopefully we’ll get some more details as to what they were doing there!! Like us, Suriname has gold deposits, and your Eyewitness suspects these armed Chinese were members of a “Triad” – a Chinese gang – protecting some Chinese operator from the Surinamese version of the Venezuelan Sindicatos extorting blood gold!!
Now this seizure of armed Chinese should be a warning to us. Over here, in addition to Chinese mining our bauxite and manganese, they’ve taken over the supermarket and home improvement market!! Periodically, we read about bandits attacking members of the latter businesses – and we shouldn’t be surprised if Chinese triads start operations here!!
Meanwhile, the Chinese Govt defines the Chinese diaspora as part of its citizenry – and recently passed laws to control their activities.
What say they about the Triads??
…PNC’s credibility
Fried Chicken Man – PNC’s Parliamentary leader – has called for changes in the Integrity Commission’s legal wherewithal to permit the release of details of the assets of stipulated “declarants”.
Shouldn’t he declare his assets as an exemplar of probity??
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