The Tribune

By LEANDRA ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

lrrolle@tribunemedia.net

FREE National Movement Leader Michael Pintard said the Davis administration has not built on the progress its predecessor made toward repairing generation woes at Bahamas Power & Light.

His comment came after Works and Utilities Minister Alfred Sears warned there could be more load shedding this summer.

Mr Sears said that while New Providence’s generation demand has never exceeded 263MW, peak summer load may exceed 270MW –– more than BPL can handle.

“When the Davis administration came to office, remember the summer of 2021, there wasn’t load shedding that was going on by BPL due to a lack of generation, and the reason was when they came to power, they met approximately 326MW of available generation, and that was a combination of the new station A that was built and then, of course, you had the additional complement of 270MW,” Mr Pintard said.

“So again, there was not a generation problem which directly rebuts the comments being made by Minister Sears. You would also recall in addition to the generation capacity that BPL itself had, you had an additional 56MW of rental generation, which was a combination of Sun Oil, I think it was roughly around 16MW, and then, of course, the Aggreko generators were 40MW.”

“This is what he met in place that he’s unable to dispute despite all the red herrings that he and the prime minister has raised.”

The FNM leader also highlighted several strategies the Minnis administration intended to follow, including transitioning from heavy fuel to cleaner fuel.

“The goal was to build an LNG plant as we transition to renewables,” he said. “The other part of that plan was looking at the Family Islands to create new ownership by letting renewables lead the way in power generation.”

“There was also a clear plan around the infrastructural development in order to assist in stabilising the grid so that even when you get into the business of others, that is, citizens’ businesses generating power and feeding back to the grid, one of the knocks on why that didn’t happen was because of concern about the instability of the grid and the need to strengthen that.”