Mauritius - a Sustainable Island: Development of Feed-In-Tariffs and Incentive Schemes for Small Scale Distributed Generators in Mauritius

The Government of Mauritius has a long-term vision of transforming Mauritius into a sustainable Island. One important element towards the achievement of this vision is to increase the country's renewable energy usage and thereby reducing dependence on fossil fuels. Democratisation of energy production is determined to be the way forward. A step in this direction is to devolve upon citizens the ability and motivation to produce electricity via small-scale distributed generation (SSDG), i.e. wind, photovoltaic and hydro installations below 50 kW. Given that SSDG is more expensive per installed capacity than the existing much larger power plants, subsidies are needed so as to provide incentives to small independent power producers (SIPP), households and firms to invest in SSDG.The paper presents the context, the theoretical considerations and the proposed incentive schemes to enable electricity production via SSDG. Furthermore, the paper gives an update on the implementation in Mauritius of the proposed incentives.