JPS - Building Jamaica with Science and Technology

The Jamaica Public Service Company Limited (JPS) is well aware of the importance of science and technology in relation to national development.

Headed by President and Chief Executive Officer Kelly Tomblin, JPS has recognised the need to strengthen the nation's science and technology infrastructure in line with national development goals.

Tomblin, having worked for more than 20 years in the energy industry throughout the United States, the United Kingdom and Latin America, has a track record of organisational transformation. Tomblin said she and her team are committed to improving the systems by which they operate to ensure Jamaica meets the standards of the modern world.

"Technology and innovation are at the core of the revolution that JPS said that we wanted to ignite in 2013. It is permeating every area of our business. When we think technology, we think large projects, but we are trying to break it down into everyday way of life, both in technology implementation and also in our way of thinking," Tomblin said.

Technology, she said, has been applied to all aspects of the company's operations, including fuel diversity, new diagnostics and its enterprise asset management that will help plants run longer and better.

The energy sector, Tomblin said, has been plagued by waste, including having someone physically reading a meter and generating a physical bill that customers have to go to an office to pay.

"All of this is archaic. What we are really excited about is keeping energy prices lower through looking at the core of energy and how we are spending our money. We created, this year, an office of technology from which you have heard about our smart home or our smart grid. That is going into the concept of making our lives more comfortable and giving our customers more power, and making sure we eliminate all the waste we can," Tomblin said.

Vision to lead energy revolution

She noted that the company's vision is to lead an energy revolution for the growth and prosperity of Jamaica. That will require forward thinking and the technology that supports these objectives.

"We are really on an evolution of technology and innovation. We are not settling for [the] short term. We are not settling for second best. We are setting our sights on the best in technology, the smartest homes and the smartest cities," she said.

JPS has begun the installation of technology for a more intelligent electricity grid that will offer customers value-added services, improvement in network reliability and faster service response.

Customers will have access to free, real-time information on their electricity usage. The technology facilitates quicker response to power outages and other service issues. JPS will be able to do remote meter readings.

Customers who are on what is referred to as the 'smart grid' will have the option of choosing to access add-on features that facilitate remote control over home appliances and lighting, allowing for better monitoring of energy usage.

According to Gary Barrow, chief technology officer at JPS, the energy sector in Jamaica is going through a profound transition, primarily driven by technological advances. "Over the past three to four years, we have spent over US$15 million to change our entire technology platform. All our core systems have been transformed because we want to ensure that we have the technological platform to support our customers and to improve our reliability," Barrow said.

"We have been putting in a number of new technologies. We have put in our distributed automated switches that are smart sensors that are able to sense when there is a fault on our grid, and we are able to then re-route our customers to another part of the grid that does not have a fault. This has significantly reduced the outage time and the time it takes to restore our customer's service," Barrow added.

Barrow is also excited about the building of the first smart city on the island. He said New Kingston is being used as the pilot area. "New Kingston is three to four times brighter than it was before. It is certainly a symbol of what technology can do," he said.

JPS is the recipient of the 2016 Gleaner Honour Award in the Science and Technology category.

According to Tomblin, JPS is honoured to be recognised in this way.

"I am so proud to lead the 1,700 Jamaicans who are working so hard every day. I think sometimes we do not 'big up' ourselves enough. We have the ability and the capability to bring something really magical to the world. We have the vision, we have the ability to execute and we are going to do that, and [we] promise to keep Jamaica proud," she said.