The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

AND ANNELIA NIXON

TRIBUNE Business Reporters

AN OUTSPOKEN businessman says Bahamas Power & Light’s (BPL) latest woes have cost his company “at least $100,000” in generator repairs and related expenses, as he blasted: “You bank on BPL being dreadful, but not all the time.”

Dionisio D’Aguilar, Superwash’s principal, told Tribune Business that when he entered the laundromat industry “I didn’t think I’d also have to go into the generator business”. He revealed that, of his 12 locations, two are presently exposed without generators because one “failed completely” while another is “running hot” because BPL’s more frequent and extended outages have imposed greater “strain” due to their extra use.

Asserting that it is “impossible to operate a business in The Bahamas” without generators, the former minister of tourism and aviation in the Minnis administration’s Cabinet said his business is far from alone in having back-up power difficulties as “everyone is screaming for parts from their suppliers” due to increased wear and tear on their generators.

Describing both energy supply, and just operating a business in The Bahamas, as “a major nightmare”, Mr D’Aguilar told this newspaper that his days are increasingly “consumed by generator problems, power problems and electrical equipment failures” due to the escalating unreliability of BPL’s supply - outages combined with “dips, spikes, swings and surges” that damage key assets and cause their failure.

And, with the Davis administration’s much-touted energy reforms failing to deliver relief and improvements for Bahamian households and businesses in the short-term, he demanded that the Government “stop selling a story” and instead divert all available resources and state agencies to “fix the problem” so that New Providence receives reliable power supply “99 percent of the time”.

Calling on the Government to find the necessary funding by reducing travel, and seeking savings elsewhere in its Budget, Mr D’Aguilar argued that The Bahamas’ ambitions to attain - and be seen - as a “first world class country” will never be achieved unless it resolves the long-standing weaknesses caused by power being too expensive, too unreliable and too dirty.

Speaking after last Wednesday’s island-wide New Providence outage, the Superwash chief - who was temporarily off-island - said: “My people say it’s a disaster; the power going on and off. We’ve had generators fail, and my management team saying the Internet is going down. It’s impossible to operate.

“In The Bahamas, in the business I’m in, I need 12 generators [for each laundromat location]. You cannot operate a business in The Bahamas without a generator. You have the cost of buying a generator, purchasing fuel for the generator, maintaining the generator and, because the power is off for so long and so frequently, generators are being over-used and everyone is screaming for replacement parts from their suppliers.

“Generators are failing because they are getting significant use of late. They are pieces of equipment that fail. You are having the stress, you are having the strain of dealing with BPL power loss, having to keep 12 generators operational, equipment failing, having to source parts because they are failing more frequently because they are having to be used more often for extended periods of time,” Mr D’Aguilar added.

“It’s amazing how impactful this is on business. You have brown-outs, you have surges; it’s a total nightmare operating a business in The Bahamas with equipment that has as many electrical parts as modern machines do.. It’s so annoying and such a cost.”

Asked about the toll inflicted on Superwash by the latest BPL outages, Mr D’Aguilar pegged the cost at “at least $100,000”. He added: “I’ve got one generator that is completely down now, finished, and one that has been running hot because it has been used for an extended period of time. We are having to source parts to fix them.

“When you go into the laundromat business you don’t think you are going into the generator business…. More and more of my day seems to be consumed by generator problems, power problems, equipment being blown, electrical equipment failing because of surges and spikes, dips and swings, and nobody cares.

“It’s like the cost of doing business, and then they say don’t be late with your VAT payment or light billl because we will cut you off or come after you. If only people could appreciate how difficult it is to do business in this country, if only they could appreciate.”

The Davis administration recently touted the latest phase of its energy reforms at the ground-breaking facility for the Clifton Pier liquefied natural gas (LNG) regasification terminal, jointly owned by BISX-listed FOCOL Holdings and multinational energy giant, Shell. This was hailed a key step in transitioning New Providence’s baseload energy generation, to be operated by FOCOL and its affiliates, to LNG as a cheaper, cleaner fuel source to boost affordability.

Meanwhile, Bahamas Grid Company, the entity 40 percent owned by BPL, and to whom New Providence’s electricity grid assets were supposed to have been transferred, is now responsible for maintaining the transmission and distribution network. Some $130m worth of “foundational” grid upgrades were supposed to have been completed by end-June, aided by US electrical utility provider, Pike, but it is understood the grid asset transfer has yet to be completed.

And Anthony Christie, BPL’s chief operating officer, last week appealed to customers to slash their electricity consumption and usage because New Providence’s energy grid is nearing full capacity, with circuits and transformers overloaded due to greater-than-expected demand due to the extra summer heat.

Mr D’Aguilar, meanwhile, said he and many others are tired of “excuses” from BPL and the Government. “We are tired of complaining,” he added, “because, at the end of the day, no one care. The civil servants get paid no matter what, the taxman collects money no matter what. No one fixes the problem.

“To operate a business in The Bahamas, you have to have a generator. The power goes off, systems don’t come back on. It’s just a major nightmare; it really is. It’s never been this bad. We are so sick of it and we have to incur all these extra costs.

“If we can see light at the end of the tunnel, can see it getting better, and all the bills and taxes being collected making life and business better, we don’t mind paying it, but we are paying more and it’s not getting better. The people at BPL should be ashamed of themselves. The only people getting screwed are BPL’s customers,” Mr D’Aguilar blasted.

“All we want is reliable, clean power supply. After 53 years of Independence, I don’t think we’ve done that. You bank on BPL being dreadful, but not being dreadful all the time. There are dips and swings, and spikes and surges. It’s an awful company, but there’s a law that says you have to use them.

“I’m tired of hearing the problems, tired of hearing of the excuses. We want power on 99 percent of the time, we want it to be reliable, we want it to be clean and we want it to be consistent. I ain’t into no story any more. I just don’t care. People will always say ‘Dionisio D’Aguilar can afford it, what’s he bitching about?’ But nobody is trying to make it better. It’s always: ‘We’re coming, we’re fixing it’. When you tell the same story ten times’ and it’s not getting better, just fix it. Until then, shut up.”

The Davis administration has inherited BPL’s, and the wider energy sector’s, long-standing deficiencies which date back to the first Christie administration when the then-minister responsible, the late Bradley Roberts, and the late Al Jarrett, its chairman, cut the base rate portion of its tariff below cost. This meant BPL’s parent, BEC, was selling electricity below the cost it took to produce it, which ultimately plunged the latter into $20m-plus annual losses and left no maintenance budget.

Successive administrations promised, but ultimately failed, to BEC and BPL, giving the Davis administration - which has been in office almost five years across two terms - its chance. However, the energy reforms it has promised have yet to take effect or be felt, leading many Bahamians to adopt a ‘believe it when I see it’ attitude.

Mr D’Aguilar called on the Government to allocate every available resource and dollar to fixing BPL’s energy crisis given electricity’s fundamental importance to commerce and daily life - even if it means drawing from other areas of the Budget or halting/suspending “pork barrel” projects.

“I don’t care what else you do,” he slammed. “Fix the power supply. I don’t care how much money you have to throw at it. Fix it. You have to have reliable power supply to be a first-world class country. If we want to be a third world country, carry on.

“They [the Government] are running on with this and that, and we don’t have reliable power supply. They are selling a story, running on with this and that. Just fix it, man, and bring all the agencies of state to focus on this one particular item. If they can fix the power supply to the point where it’s 99.9 percent reliable, then we’ll be eternally thankful. It’s not as if the power supply has blown just on New Providence; it’s blown on multiple islands.

“Let’s focus on this. We want reliable power. Drop all the unnecessary programmes and focus on the power. I’m sure the pundits will say ‘D’Aguilar, shut up’. But you just get so sick of it. You take it, take it. You ask yourself: Will it get better?”

Other businesses have experienced similar challenges. Cheryl Cambridge, proprietor of Cheryl’s Bahamas Taxi & Tours, said repeated outages have disrupted daily operations and increased labour costs.

“We catching hell,” she said. Ms Cambridge explained that without electricity her office was unable to print driver schedules or airport pick-up signs, forcing employees to remain at work long after normal hours in the hope power would return.

“My staff had to work overtime, waiting for it to come on,” she said. “It didn’t come on. So we couldn’t print the spreadsheet for the drivers and for the airport. And we couldn’t print all of our signs to put out at the airport.”

The outages also left the company’s office without air conditioning and prevented staff from properly setting the security alarm. “It’s costing us a lot of money,” Ms Cambridge said. “And what they need to do, they need to buy some brand new damn generators.” 

The outages have also disrupted retail activity. On Friday, Quality Home Centre was forced to turn away customers after losing power during business hours. Tribune Business was also turned away from a Super Value location recently after its generator failed to kick-in amid a BPL outage to leave the store without power.

BPL’s Mr Christie last week said: “We've seen an increase in demand, and we're approaching our capacity. A lot of our circuits are overloaded. Transformers are at their peak capacity.” He added that BPL was balancing loads and relieving circuits where necessary as it responded to outages that he described as uncommon during the summer.

“We do have a number of other areas that have some overloading situations, and again, we're in a period of high temperatures, high demand on our systems so we're seeing some outages occur that are not common or not frequently seen by us during the summer period,” Mr Christie said.