Mauritius Electric Buses Run on Coal

Mauritius imported 90.9 percent of its primary energy in 2024. Of that total, petroleum products accounted for 61.1 percent and coal for 29.8 percent. These are not projections. They are verified figures from the United States Department of Commerce International Trade Administration, published in February 2026, drawing on Mauritius government energy statistics. The Central Electricity Board itself states on its website that the bulk of electricity in Mauritius is generated from heavy fuel oil and coal. The island has a favourable solar regime of approximately 6 kilowatt-hours per square metre per day and wind speeds averaging 8.1 metres per second in certain regions. These are exceptional natural resources for a tropical island. They are largely untapped. In their place, the CEB burns imported coal from South Africa during the off-crop season and heavy fuel oil throughout the year, supplemented by bagasse during the sugarcane harvest. This is the grid into which the government is now subsidising citizens to plug their electric vehicles.

The electric bus subsidy is real and documented. Under the 2023-2024 budget, bus companies received a 30 percent subsidy of up to Rs 3.5 million on the purchase of electric buses. The 2025-2026 budget renewed the negative excise duty of Rs 200,000 on electric vehicle purchases. These are public expenditure decisions, drawn from public revenue, designed to accelerate the adoption of electric transport.

The question this expenditure demands is precise: what is the carbon content of the electricity that will power these vehicles? The answer, on the current grid, is not encouraging. In 2021, verified data places coal at 42 percent of electricity generation and oil at 36.67 percent -- together accounting for nearly 79 percent of all electricity produced. The renewable share, including bagasse which is seasonal and dependent on the sugarcane crop, stood below 22 percent. The grid has improved marginally since then, and the government's own renewable energy programmes are adding capacity. But the direction of improvement is insufficient relative to the speed at which electric vehicles are being subsidised into the market. The physics of the electric vehicle are sound -- an electric motor converts energy to motion more efficiently than a combustion engine even on a dirty grid. But from a macroeconomic and import dependency standpoint, the current model presents a structural problem that the ribbon-cutting does not address.

The structural absurdity of the current model can be stated plainly. The government heavily taxes the population through fuel levies and import duties, then uses those funds partly to subsidise the import of volatile heavy fuel oil and coal to keep electricity tariffs at a socially manageable level. Simultaneously, it manipulates import duties to encourage the purchase of electric vehicles that run on the electricity generated by those same fossil fuels. The citizen pays the tax. The auto dealership profits on the EV sale. The international fossil fuel market receives payment for the coal and oil. The CEB burns the fuel, generates the electricity and sells it at a subsidised tariff. The electric bus arrives at its terminus having produced no domestic energy value anywhere in the chain.

Meanwhile, the government presents this arrangement on the international stage as a green transition eligible for climate finance. The island receives credit for decarbonising transport while its electricity grid remains among the most fossil-fuel-dependent in the Indian Ocean region. The only thing that has not changed is the total, structural dependency on foreign ships bringing imported energy to Mauritian shores. The nature of what those ships carry has shifted marginally -- some coal now substitutes for some oil -- but the dependency itself is unchanged and in some dimensions deeper.

The question that every frustrated Mauritian has asked is the obvious one: the island is tropical, the sun is abundant and free, the technology for rooftop solar and battery storage is proven and increasingly affordable. Why is Mauritius still burning imported coal to charge buses when it could be harvesting energy from its own roof? The answer requires understanding not just the physics of energy but the politics of it.

Fossil fuels are inherently centralised. They require massive procurement contracts, deep-water ports, centralised storage facilities, a parastatal utility to distribute the power, and government approval at every stage of the supply chain. Centralised energy infrastructure means centralised political control and highly lucrative procurement contracts. The coal import from South Africa, the heavy fuel oil purchase from international traders, the STC's role in fuel procurement, the CEB's monopoly on distribution -- each of these represents a node of political and commercial power that a decentralised energy system would dissolve.

Rooftop solar is structurally different. If a meaningful proportion of Mauritian households and businesses installed subsidised solar panels with battery storage -- and the technology cost to do this has fallen by over 80 percent since 2010 -- those households would become energy producers rather than energy consumers. The CEB's distribution monopoly would face its first serious structural challenge. The massive import contracts for heavy fuel oil and coal would shrink. The citizen generating power from their own roof to charge their own vehicle does not need the state's fuel subsidy, the state's electricity tariff subsidy, or the state's electric vehicle purchase incentive. They are, within the limits of their energy budget, economically independent from the fossil fuel supply chain.

The energy question is the Import Dependency Trap in its purest form. The Meridian has documented this trap across the April 2026 edition in the context of food, fertiliser and foreign exchange. The energy version of the same trap is structurally identical. Mauritius imports the fuel that generates the electricity that powers the vehicles that serve the tourists who generate the foreign exchange that pays for the fuel. Every element of the chain is imported. Every element generates a cost in foreign exchange. Every depreciation of the rupee makes each imported element more expensive in local currency, which widens the subsidy cost to the government, which deepens the fiscal deficit, which creates pressure for the kind of structural adjustment that no political class with an election cycle to consider willingly accepts.

The electric vehicle programme, as currently structured, does not break this loop. It adds a new imported element -- the electric vehicle itself, manufactured abroad, assembled abroad, shipped to Mauritius and sold by a local dealership at a price supported by a government subsidy funded by the same fossil fuel levy that maintains the electricity tariff that makes the EV economically viable. The loop has simply acquired a new expensive component while its fundamental structure remains unchanged.

The April 2026 context gives the energy dependency question an additional urgency that the ribbon-cutting ceremony does not acknowledge. Tanker transits through the Strait of Hormuz are running 90 percent below pre-war levels. Oil is above 100 dollars per barrel. War risk insurance premiums have risen approximately 400 percent since the conflict began on 28 February 2026. Every litre of heavy fuel oil that arrives in Port Louis now carries a geopolitical surcharge that the CEB must absorb, pass to the tariff, or watch accumulate as a liability on the STC's balance sheet.

In early 2025, before the Hormuz crisis, Mauritius was already struggling to meet peak electricity demand during the summer months and released a tender for power barges as a stop-gap measure to boost output by up to 100 megawatts per day. That tender was subsequently withdrawn following press scrutiny of the environmental impact. The government is now facing a structural electricity supply constraint at exactly the moment when global fuel costs are highest, the rupee is most depreciated, and the political case for expensive imported energy is weakest. This is the grid into which the electric bus is being plugged.