Prime Minister of Curaçao

PRIME MINISTER OF CURAÇAO the same fashion, when the new Damen docks arrived in our harbor last April, the community came out. It was early in the morning on a Sunday. I went out on a tugboat, myself. And when we came in, I saw the people standing and welcom- ing this giant ship with the two floating docks on it. You had people taking pic- tures; you had social media. These are the kinds of events that we need to create so that people believe.The next week, I went to church, and a lady told me,‘What you did, last week, gives us hope.’ So it affirms what you said: people have to see it; they have to see more people working and that takes tremendous focus and all the ministers working together on jobs, jobs, jobs. “We need to have programs that ed- ucate and train our workforce with new skills so that we can have retrenchment in the new jobs; and for the unemployed, we need to have programs that will pre- pare them for the gaps that are opening up. You have several large businesses that have a ‘graying’workforce. So, the Minister of Education and the Minister of Labor and Social Development are working together on one of the keystone projects–an edu- cation institute for practical skills.We are going to see howwe can merge it with pri- vate institutions and create a public-private practical skills education center.We cannot keep staring at the high number of unem- ployed youth and not do anything.” BVM: Does your administration have any green initiatives; any sustainable programs or practices that you are hoping to see manifest? Rhuggenaath: Yes.We just approved, after years of effort, a new energy pol- icy, which is a transition policy to more renewable energy.We have about 30 percent renewable, right now, and we want to move towards 50 percent by 2035.We have windmills, already, and there’s an open bid going on, right now, for solar powered development for the utility company.We have one big landfill and we don’t want to dig another hole to take care of our waste. So, we need to have waste-to-energy plants, and we need an open bid for that.The energy policy also includes building codes that need to be adapted, using more renewable energy, as well as a smart grid for our energy dis- tribution so that we have better efficien- cy with regard to electricity. “We also look at transportation. Our utility company, Aqualectra, is preparing to upload docks for charging electric cars. So, the utility company is moving in that direction. I encouraged our public transportation company, which is going to renew its fleet, to move towards elec- tric buses. And I do hope that the gov- ernment will also move towards electric in its fleet. And in our government pro- curement policies –we can encourage businesses that have green and renew- able techniques in their companies or in their products and services. “In the new harbor, we included sus- tainable development goals, and are using it as a model for developing re- newable energy. And that is why the Port of Rotterdam is very interested, because in Europe, they are doing much more in transitioning to renewable energy. So, the harbor operating company is moving towards renewable energy and it’s avail- able to us, as part of the kingdom. That’s