From RED to ZEDE: What Honduran Company Will Develop the First ZEDE?

One Honduran company, Energía Renovable de Honduras, S.A. (ERHSA) has already drafted a concept for a RED in Amapala, in 2011.  Their concept, illustrated in a video and a slide show, seems to advocate for the installation of tidal generators, solar concentrators, and wind power.

ERHSA has never developed or installed any of these technologies.

What the slides show is a bridge running from Coyolito on the mainland, to Punta Segundo, roughly duplicating the current ferry route.  The bridge would be 15 meters wide.  Below it would be a series of tidal generators.  The deck itself would contain a two lane roadway, and lanes for pedestrians and bicycles as well as a zone for the above water equipment used in generating and transmitting power.

A "dock" would run from Punta Segundo out to Isla Concepcion and would house a deep water port with docks for cruise ships, a cargo area, and fuel service.  Isla Concepcion would be developed with a single giant glass pyramid-shaped structure that would contain apartments, commercial space, office space, recreation space, and so forth.

A bridge running from El Tigre island to Isla El Pacar would allow that island to be developed with tourist hotels and a large marina.

Plans call for a commercial airport built in the water near Amapala on El Tigre island with an 8200 foot landing strip, taxiways, and hangars.  This should be long enough for most larger aircraft in service in Central America.  A road and rail system would circumnavigate the island, with a tram taking people to the top of the extinct volcano that formed the island.  Punta Segunda would be used as a shipping container storage area, and for utilities including fuel storage and a solar concentrator power station.  The island would also have a technical university, a water desalination plant, a water treatment plant, a hospital, and a technology center.  Amapala itself would have its own seaport with commercial, cargo, and recreational boat docking areas.

Wind turbines would be set up on the sides of the volcano itself on Isla Tigre, as well as along the bridge from the mainland, along the dock structure, and on Isla Concepcion.

It's an ambitious plan, well beyond ERHSA's ability to fund, and well beyond anything they've ever developed.

A major drawback of ERHSA's presentation is that it is lifted wholesale from other technology companies, like OpenHydro, which designed the tidal generators shown in the video.  There's no indication of a partnership between ERHSA and the key technology companies visualized in the video.  Instead, ERHSA announced a partnership with the Korean firm Soosung, which makes industrial lift technology.

ERHSA has a history, and it is not promising.

It is also the company that sold the Sayab wind project, just a gleam in their eye at the time, to MINERCO, when MINERCO was pretending to be an energy company. Filings with the SEC indicate that MINERCO never paid ERHSA for its rights to Sayab, so they may have reverted to ERHSA. 

ERHSA did not then, and does not now, have access to the funding to develop any of its listed projects.

What ERHSA seems to do well is imagining a project.  They have never had the funding to develop any of the projects they imagined. It is hard to believe that it would turn out well if their first project was of the scale envisaged in their proposal.