Assessment of Haiti's Electricity Sector

Boston University's Institute of Sustainable Energy reviews the publicly available information on Haiti's electricity sector, supplemented by targeted interviews, and organizes it around the three entities that operate multi-customer grids. Electricite d'Haiti, the vertically integrated state utility created when the government nationalized the sector in 1971, is described as being in dire straits both operationally and financially: it is responsible for supply nationwide, yet only about 20 to 40 percent of Haitians receive service and virtually none receive it around the clock without their own backup generation.

Technical and commercial losses mean EDH collects revenue on roughly 20 percent of the electricity it sells, so it depends on growing subsidies from an already strained budget. The government's move to stand up a regulator, ANARSE, is read as a positive step tempered by the record of earlier reform attempts that produced little. Three independent power producers, Sogener, E-Power and Haytrac, now generate the majority of Haiti's electricity, but sell to EDH as their only buyer and therefore depend on international guarantees to be paid.

A third chapter covers independent microgrids serving communities beyond the EDH network. The report is explicit about its limits: interviews were not conducted with EDH, with any part of the government, or with the United States government or other multilateral agencies, and the authors caution that data on the sector is scarce, of uncertain quality and often conflicting, so judgement was required and sources were triangulated where possible.