The Tribune

By RICARDO WELLS

Tribune Staff Reporter

rwells@tribunemedia.net

THE Democratic National Alliance protested outside Bahamas Power and Light’s Blue Hill Road headquarters yesterday, taking issue with a proposed rate hike and shoddy service by the company in recent months.

DNA Leader Branville McCartney and Deputy Leader Chris Mortimer, flanked by a handful of the party’s supporters, assembled in front of BPL’s Peter I Bethel office on Monday, to urge Bahamians to “realise that more is possible.”

In an interview with members of the press during the protest, Mr McCartney condemned both the Free National Movement and the governing Progressive Liberal Party for what he termed a system of failure perpetuated by greed and stagnation.

The former Bamboo Town MP said his party has spent much of the last five years developing a system, that once elected, they could enact from day one to ease the energy burden placed on the backs of Bahamians by inept governments.

Mr McCartney called it “ridiculous” that Bahamians were suffering with high priced power and regular outages, in an age in which “more is available.”

“It is a discomfort and it causes business to continue to lose business, and in an environment that isn’t conducive to businesses as it is. So we are out here, we are trying to get our voices heard,” the former junior Cabinet minister said.

“It must stop man! And we must be in a position as Bahamians to stand up and stand out. If we don’t, we will continue to get the kind of treatment that we are getting. That is why we are here.”

He continued: “We are telling the Bahamian people as well, that look, this is something we are going to fix when we get in. We believe in energy reform, we believe that at the end of the day we should not be this antiquated in the way we get energy in this country. We have solar, we have hydro, we have waste; and I just, for the life of me (I don’t see why) we are where we are in 2016.”

Mr Mortimer added that all modern plans to improve and advance the Bahamas hinge on modern, cost-efficient energy solutions.

Mr Mortimer indicated that technological advances in LNG and solar power could allow the Bahamas to achieve energy efficiency at a very low cost.

“There is no way, right across the shores in the United States of America, power is at 15 cents, 12 cents per kilowatt-hour. (BPL is) at 38 cents per kilowatt-hour and they want an increase. We can never be a successful Bahamas paying that rate. We want the rate that they are paying in the United States or, we are prepared to pay a little bit more,” he said.

He added: “What BPL is about, it is about protecting a legacy industry that quite honestly, its days are done.”

Bahamas Power and Light has been heavily criticised for its poor service quality in recent months. For many residents in New Providence, daily power cuts have become the norm.

In July, BPL CEO Pamela Hill acknowledged that power cuts this year have been more frequent than last year, but said BPL should have had rental generators by the end of the summer to help with reliability.

For the past two weeks, customers across New Providence have experienced three to four hour power cuts in some instances as BPL continued to struggle with generation issues.

Last week Monday, nearly one month after the first set of rental generators secured for BPL arrived in the country, a union official said the site for the engines had not been prepared and the generators will “probably not be installed for another couple weeks.”

Two days later, BPL’s Corporate Communications Manager Arnette Ingraham said the company is “hoping” to have the generators installed by the end of this week.