Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit told Dominicans this week what every Caribbean head of government is having to tell their citizens this month: the fuel hike at the pump has very little to do with anything happening on this island, and everything to do with shipping lanes thousands of miles away.
Brent crude settled above $114 per barrel earlier in May, the highest 2026 close to date, after Washington launched a new operation aimed at restoring tanker flow through the Strait of Hormuz. West Texas Intermediate followed. Every importer of refined product in the hemisphere is now passing those increases on to retail. There is no Caribbean energy ministry with the leverage to insulate its consumers from that shock — not the way the math currently works, not without a level of public subsidy nobody’s treasury can sustain.
Skerrit’s framing was straightforward: external cause, external timeline, government will absorb what it can but cannot absorb all of it. It is the right framing. It is also the framing that makes the geothermal commissioning underway at DOMLEC suddenly read as a different kind of story than it did six months ago.
For roughly fifteen years, Dominica’s geothermal project has been talked about in the language of climate leadership — a small island demonstrating that a renewable baseload was possible, exporting clean energy to neighbours, anchoring the country’s green credentials. All of that remains true. What is also true, and what the Hormuz situation has now made impossible to ignore, is that geothermal is a sovereignty project. A country that generates its own electricity from the heat under its own ground is a country that does not have to call an emergency cabinet meeting every time the Persian Gulf shipping lanes get squeezed.
DOMLEC is now in the commissioning phase. The technical milestones — capacity testing, grid integration, redundancy verification — are unglamorous and slow. The political milestone, the moment the country can credibly say its electricity is decoupled from Gulf oil prices, arrives at the end of that process. When it does, Dominica will become one of a very small number of countries on earth that can point to an actual structural answer to the question every other small economy is asking right now.
In the meantime, the pump prices keep going up. Skerrit did not promise relief he could not deliver. He did, in essence, point at the geothermal plant and ask Dominicans to hold on a little longer.
Also today: The Caribbean Public Health Agency confirmed successful deployment of Molbio rapid diagnostic systems across the region; the Dominica Football Association named Vladimir Corbette to a senior post; and Skerrit issued congratulations to PM Davis of The Bahamas on his second consecutive term.
Trade Winds Brief — Caribbean and diaspora news, analysis, and accountability journalism.