ROSEAU, Dominica — The island of Dominica has 72,000 people, nine volcanoes and, as of Thursday, a power plant that runs on the heat beneath them.
The 10-megawatt geothermal station in the Roseau Valley, five kilometers inland from the capital, was connected to the national grid this week after test runs in September, the state utility announced. At full output it will supply about 40 percent of the island’s electricity and displace an estimated 9 million liters of imported diesel a year, roughly half of what the island burns for power.
For a country whose fuel bill consumed 12 percent of import spending last year, the arithmetic is simple. “Every tanker that does not come is money that stays here,” said Delroy Jno Baptiste, chief executive of the government-owned geothermal company. “We have been sitting on this heat since before there were people on this island.”
The project took almost two decades. Exploratory wells were drilled in 2012 with French and European Union funding, and plans for a much larger plant that would have exported power by undersea cable to Guadeloupe and Martinique were shelved after Hurricane Maria flattened the island in 2017. The scaled-down domestic plant, financed with $85 million from the World Bank, the Caribbean Development Bank and a British climate fund, broke ground in 2023. Two production wells, each about 1,200 meters deep, draw brine at 240 degrees Celsius.
Dominica is the first of the small Eastern Caribbean states to bring geothermal power online, though St. Vincent, St. Kitts and Grenada all have projects in various stages. Across the region, islands that burn diesel pay some of the highest electricity prices in the Western Hemisphere, about 40 United States cents a kilowatt-hour, more than double the American average.
The utility has promised a 15 percent cut in household tariffs from January, the first reduction in a decade. In Laudat, the village nearest the plant, residents said they would believe it when the bills arrived. “They told us about the plant when my daughter was in primary school. She has a daughter now,” said Veronica Lockhart, who runs a guesthouse for hikers heading to the Boiling Lake. “The steam is good. The price is what matters.”
The plant is also part of Dominica’s wider ambition, declared after Maria, to become the world’s first climate-resilient nation. The island has rebuilt 6,000 homes to hurricane standards, buried power lines in the capital, and plans a second geothermal unit of 10 megawatts by 2030, which would allow it to shut its diesel plant entirely except as backup.
Geologists caution that a volcanic island’s heat is not always cooperative. Wells in Montserrat lost pressure after a few years, and Dominica’s reservoir will need monitoring. But on Thursday evening, as the plant’s turbine spun up for the first full night of operation, the lights in Roseau stayed on, which, residents noted, is not something they have always been able to say.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 2 of the European edition with the headline: Tiny Dominica Switches On a Geothermal Plant and Cuts Its Diesel Imports in Half.
