UPDATED: Load shedding back after daytime reprieve

Bahamas Power and Light headquarters.

As of Tuesday, August 20, 2019

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

NEW Providence residents and businesses got a temporary reprieve from power woes Tuesday as Bahamas Power & Light avoided load shedding throughout the day.

BPL’s aging equipment held up to meet the day’s peak demand, a company spokesperson said.

However, BPL released a statement at 9.30pm Tuesday night saying that, after a day of no load shedding, the company was forced to load shed in the evening and that customers in the following areas would experience load shedding in a three-hour rotation:

Neighbourhoods in the vicinity of West Bay Street from Blake Road to Old Fort Bay (Love Beach, Yuma Estates, Bahama West, Gambier, etc) off until 11.45pm, followed by neighbourhoods off JFK in the vicinity of LPIA including Tropical Gardens, Charlottesville, Old Fort Bay, Venetian West and surrounding areas.

Residents of at least two Family Islands were not as lucky during the day, however, with communities in Acklins suffering a three-hour power cut. However this was due to work on BPL's high voltage power lines on the island. BPL also announced interruptions in power supply to some parts of Abaco yesterday to replace a high voltage pole.

BPL anticipates a 30 megawatt shortfall today with average power outages lasting three hours, according to its daily fact sheet.

“Our current availability is 200 megawatts against an expected day peak of 21 megawatts and an expected evening peak of 225 megawatts,” the company reported.

On Monday, Prime Minister Dr Hubert Minnis pledged to fix BPL and reverse years of neglect.

“We would read quite a bit about ‘oh the technology being archaic’ but when you see it for yourself then you have a better understanding. Can you imagine in the nerve centre, or the operational centre, they’re still using floppy disk? We are now in the technological era, those are things that need to be corrected and those are things that they are correcting," he said.

“So we’re looking at more than 20 years of neglect and now we’re correcting those problems and we’re going to correct those once and for all. We’ve had similar problems with the dump and now we’re correcting that. Energy must be corrected and we will place all our energy, all of our resources to ensure that we have not only short-term solutions, but that we have permanent solutions so you won’t experience this problem and your generation moving forward (won’t experience it either),” Dr Minnis said.

He also said: “Whatever BPL needs, BPL will get. What we’re experiencing today is an emergency situation as far as I’m concerned and, yes, the government has a budget, but this is an emergency and the government will have to use all its resources and talent and move resources around but this must be fixed and this will be fixed.”

Well_mudda_take_sic 5 years, 4 months ago

For Hubert Minnis and KP Turnquest to claim that they did not know of or expect the many problems BPL has been experiencing for many years now, says much about the character, honesty and integrity of both of these most deceitful imbecilies. Minnis and Turnquest deliberately turned a blind eye to BPL's operational problems rooted in its grave financial woes so that they could produce and table misleading pie-in-the-sky national financial budgets for public consumption with the aim of obtaining higher credit ratings from Moody's and S&P than our country deserves. In other words, by deliberately painting a much better picture in our national financial budgets than deserved by the true state of our country's financial affairs, these two bozos have engaged in fraudulent financial reporting by its very definition. And now, because of the emergency/crisis situation that was allowed to come to a head on their watch, instead of being properly addressed by them as a matter of priority starting more than two years ago, they find themselves politically blackmailed into literally throwing away millions and millions of dollars more than would have otherwise been required. The foreign equipment vendors, foreign engineers, foreign technicians and foreign consultants are now all going to stick it to us but good simply because everything must now be done by them on an emergency expedited basis. Of course Minnis and Turnquest will now pay whatever is asked by borrowing willy-nilly in an effort to save their political hides, leaving Bahamian taxpayers with humongous increases in our national debt. The buffoonery here on the part of Minnis and Turnquest cannot be overstated.

And with Minnis and Turnquest now both claiming they did not know of or expect BPL's problems, just what does that say about the Minister responsible (Bannister) and the entire current Board of BPL? The proof of the untruthfulness and decietfulness of Minnis and Turnquest lies in the fact that they are not inclined to insist Bannister resign from his cabinet post or sack the entire Board of BPL. Moxey, Heastie and Maynard should also be given their walking papers, but no, none of this will happen because Minnis and Turnquest are themselves duplicitous in turning a blind eye to all of BPL's problems. They've all been grossly negligent as a result of their gross deceitfulness.

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