The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

Bahamas Power & Light (BPL) has completed its investigations into recent power outages on New Providence.

An outage on January 17th was caused by a bus bar failure at the Windsor Field substation, according to BPL’s Executive Vice President Kenneth Kocibua in a press statement released Friday.

“The failure was unforeseen as we recently completed thorough assessments of all substations following Hurricane Matthew and problems that were evident, at the time, were addressed,” she said.

In light of the surprise failure, BPL are conducting a secondary review of all primary substations on the island to asses the functioning of key equipment, the company said.

BPL added that the power outage experienced around the island on January 13, 2017 was total system shutdown by the company .

“An investigation into the shutdown determined that third party damage to an underground cable was directly linked to the total loss of generation, transmission and distribution networks on the island,” BPL said. “BPL is now working closely with that third party to review its operations to prevent a similar occurrence.”

The company said: “BPL understands its customers’ frustration with regard to outages and have been implementing improvements to increase reliability in New Providence and the Family Islands. These include; making good use of the energy efficient 80 MW of power provided by the Aggreko engines, a new generating plant in Harbour Island, and the ongoing installation of new 33 kV underground cables between Blue Hills Power Station and the Big Pond Substation to increase transmitting capacity.

“The company assures customers that further improvements will take place in 2017 and going forward to ensure BPL’s delivery of its commitment to provide reliable and affordable power for its customers in New Providence and the Family Islands.”