The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

A former Bahamas Power & Light (BPL) chairman yesterday defended the utility’s performance under his watch, arguing that the length and frequency of outages has “never been like this”.

Leslie Miller, the ex-Cabinet minister and former Tall Pines MP, told Tribune Business: “This thing is destroying businesses and destroying people’s lives. We saved the Bahamian people 40 percent on electricity bills over three years; $50m collectively we saved them, and yet we don’t get credit.

“I call it the way I see it. It has never been like this. The record is there to show that. This administration has had two years and nothing happened yet.”

Mr Miller was hitting back at Desmond Bannister, minister of works, and who has responsibility for BPL. Mr Bannister argued earlier this week that despite several consecutive days of load shedding by the state-owned energy monopoly, BPL’s performance so far this summer has been better than any of the years under the former Christie administration.

“The Minister is a respectable man, he’s a good man, but I strongly disagree with that statement and I’m disappointed that the media didn’t challenge him on that,” Mr Miller said. “The union had to speak out. We had the best team there in the history of BEC in 2012. We had a group of people there specialist in all of the areas necessary to make the company successful.

“I am proud of the team I had the privilege to work with. There’s been no real communication with the public on what’s going on. The power is going off for hours multiple times a day. You see a bunch of cars parked up on the beach. That never happened under us.”

Tribune Business, though, can recall several times when power supply to the whole of New Providence was interrupted for the entire night when Mr Miller was chair. Customer reaction was just as fierce then as it is now, with BPL load shedding affecting only certain areas of the island - although perhaps for longer and more frequently in recent days than during prior incidents.

What is clear is that BPL’s network infrastructure, and supply reliability, have continued to deteriorate across successive administrations - both PLP and FNM. The current situation has been some 15 years in the making, and reflects poor business and bad planning stemming from cuts to the then-BEC’s base rate in 2004 that left it selling electricity below cost.

While the impact of this was masked for two years, it helped plunge BEC into annual-$20m plus losses. Given the extent of this “red ink”, maintenance on BEC’s generation engines and transmission network was cut, and investment in new assets curtailed. All of which has led to the current load shedding and blackouts.

Mr Miller, meanwhile, called for the government to reveal the outcome of investigations into the fires at the Clifton Pier plant last year which damaged BPL’s two most efficient generation engines.

“They lost over 100 MW of power. Who is going to pay that bill? Is the insurance going to pay for it? The first thing you determine is why those engines burned down at Clifton; who is responsible,” Mr Miller said. “That needs to be explained to the Bahamian people. What happened to the engines, whether those engines can be replaced or not. Is the insurance company going to pay?”