Cousine eyes solar potential |22 August 2005

The island’s draft management plan calls for complete energy sufficiency by 2010, and while solar panels are currently used for water heating in all of the hotel’s accommodations, there are plans to take it further.

Cousine manager Jock Henwood, who has been with the island for three years, said a number of different renewable energy sources have been explored, but solar appears to be the best option at this point.

“We’re still at the very early stages,” he said, noting that the island is in discussions with a UK firm “about what is possible (with solar power) and in what ways it can be set up.”

Solar energy is easy to gather but difficult to store, and the technology comes with a price. Mr Henwood said Cousine’s hotel exists solely for the sake of the long-term sustainability and conservation of the island itself, and given that Cousine is not “a money making machine,” he admits “costs will be a factor.”

Cousine is likely to get financial assistance from the UK firm, as well as support through a World Bank and Global Environment Facility project in partnership with nearby island neighbour Cousin, which is run by environment NGO Nature Seychelles.

The project has allowed the managements of both islands to pool their experiences and strategies, which is why Cousine, with 10 times the power output of Cousin and much more resources, made a better fit for an attempt at solar, said James Hardcastle of Nature Seychelles, the technical advisor for the project.

In the same way Cousin has been able to assist with anti-poaching and other conservation measures from an NGO’s perspective, the lessons learned from a solar setup on Cousine could eventually be applied to Cousin on a smaller scale.

Still, Cousine figures to balance justifiable solar spending with other endeavours that might give the island more ecological value for its money.

“We have to weigh up all of these things,” he said. “Conservation cannot work without investment.”

So while there is talk of converting to solar power for all operations, the approach for now is to gradually wean the hotel and its related facilities off of generators and on to solar power.

Solar can be applied to various items, like freezers for example. A freezer unit on Cousine needs only four hours of power per day, controlled by timers.

Items such as revolving light-sensitive solar cells, which can operate even under overcast conditions, are also planned.

Cousine will need to maintain the conventional generators as a backup or for emergency use, but it could soon be the first island in Seychelles, and maybe worldwide, to run a high-class resort entirely on renewable energy.

The move to solar is just one initiative the island’s management has considered. The hotel is also looking into the possibility of ISO 14000 environmental certification, which would be another first for Seychelles hotels.

Cousine’s conservation programme started in 1994. The hotel is in its fifth year, and Mr Henwood said since he joined in 2002 up to 1,000 trees have been planted.

The trees have remade Cousine’s forests – a former coconut plantation – into what the island might have been like hundreds of years ago, he said. In the past three years, a lush canopy has extended upwards to five metres in some places.

Restoring the greenery has been accompanied with successful translocations of endangered endemic bird species, and recently sooty terns have returned to the island to breed again, more than 50 years after they were wiped out by poaching in the 1940s.

According to Mr Henwood, Cousine’s journey back in time over the past 10 years is a way of “preserving a bit of Seychelles’ heritage.”

Hopefully for the island’s inhabitants – ranging from hotel clientele to the resident birds and breeding sea turtles – the sun will be able to provide a little help along the way.