Karpowership Grows in Step With the Dominican Republic

In 2025, the Dominican Republic's electricity regulator, the Superintendencia de Electricidad, recommended amending the concession of a power plant that floats. The plant is moored at Pueblo Viejo, in the province of Azua, and the amendment covered its expansion.

Karpowership began operating at Azua in 2023 and took the site to 408 MW in 2025, according to its Dominican country profile. Its three Powerships can now supply up to about 10% of the country's peak electricity demand, Yasin Suudi, Karpowership's executive director, told Diario Libre in an interview published on 7 October.

Building on a Site That Already Works

The expansion built on what was already in place. Suudi said the company had the infrastructure, a local team and a working relationship with Dominican institutions, and used them to add capacity in stages as the system required.

For the grid, the new capacity came in through a connection point, a workforce and a set of procedures it already knew.

A Ready-Built Power Station, Delivered by Sea

Each Powership reaches its host country as a complete power station, designed, built and commissioned before it arrives, Suudi said. Once the site and the grid connection are ready, connection and start of operations can take 15 to 30 days, he added.

The rest of the work stays with the same company. Karpowership handles design and construction in-house, then site preparation, grid integration, operation and maintenance, and fuel management. The model needs far less construction on land than a conventional plant, Suudi said.

Base Load, Peak Load and Everything Between

In a separate interview carried by El Democrático, which credits Listín Diario, Suudi said Powerships serve base load, intermediate load or peak demand, depending on what each system needs. They are modular, so capacity can be added as demand grows.

The fuel can change over the life of a project too. A Powership can move from liquid fuel to natural gas and connect to floating LNG infrastructure, he said, so the plant evolves with a country's fuel mix and power system.

One Site, a Global Fleet

The Azua project forms part of a wider Karpowership fleet of 45 Powerships and 11 LNG vessels, with more than 8,500 MW of installed capacity, according to the figures Suudi gave Diario Libre. "Generation, transmission, fuel infrastructure and permits must advance in a coordinated way," he said.

As the Caribbean adds more solar and wind, grid operators across the region will keep asking which plants they can call on when the weather turns. At Azua, that answer is already running, on a site built to keep growing.