The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

Bahamas Power & Light's (BPL) chairman yesterday pledged that it will be half-way towards its renewable energy targets by end-2025 as he hailed a 40 percent-plus drop in electricity outages.

Dr Donovan Moxey, addressing the Bahamas Business Outlook conference, outlined the state-owned utility's five-year strategic plan goals that include a 40 percent reduction in its carbon footprint via the provision of liquefied natural gas (LNG) as fuel for New Providence's power plants by summer 2023.

He also touted a 41.02 percent reduction in "outage" incidents reported in 2020 as compared to the blackout-plagued 2019, and an 80.25 percent year-over-year decline in "feeder trips" or neighbourhood power losses that peaked at 1,200-plus for the month of August 2019.

Dr Moxey said BPL's fuel hedging strategy had cut consumer fuel costs from over 19.1 cents per kilowatt hour (KWh) in 2018 to 10.5 cents presently, which had reduced the fuel charge by percent and overall bills by 30 percent. He added that the present fuel charge had "clearly surpassed" the 12.5 cents per KWh it had originally targeted.

With BPL's all-in tariff presently standing at 23 cents per KWh, Dr Moxey added that benchmarking showed its electricity prices were presently lower than rivals such as Barbados, Cayman Islands and Jamaica. Out of the region, only Suriname and Trinidad & Tobago, both of which have their own energy sources, were said to be cheaper.

And, with the Government's National Energy Policy setting the goal of producing 30 percent of this nation's energy from renewable sources by 2030, Dr Moxey pledged that BPL will hit the 15 percent threshold by the 2025 fourth quarter.

To get there, BPL will have to significantly increase the amount of solar and other sources used in its energy mix and move away from fossil fuels. This, the BPL chairman added, will be aided by its plans to have distributed battery technology "in place in New Providence by summer 2022" in a bid to ensure improved grid stability for the integration of utility-scale and roof-top solar.

He argued that this would improve demand for the small-scale residential generation (SSRG) initiative introduced in 2017, which has seen only 380 of BPL's 100,000-plus customers apply to connect their solar systems to the utility's grid and sell power to it.

Elsewhere, Dr Moxey said BPL has created a "generation control centre" that began operations several weeks ago and will ultimately allow it to have "remote access and control" of its entire generation fleet both on New Providence and the Family Islands.

The implementation has started on New Providence, with the 130 Mega Watts (MW) of generation capacity at Clifton Pier's 'Station A' that was provided by Wartsila due to come under the "control centre's" monitoring by the second quarter this year.

Dr Moxey added that the additional 90 MW that will take Clifton Pier and New Providence's "base load generation" to 220 MW will be in place by the 2022 third quarter once the $70m-$80m 'Station D' is constructed.

He pledged that Bahamian investors will be given an opportunity to own part of Stations A and D, which will be combined into an entity called 'PowerCo'. That will be owned 49 percent by the Government and local shareholders, while Shell or whoever BPL selects as a partner will have majority 51 percent control.

With Clifton Pier resuming its role as BPL's chief power generating station, Dr Moxey said BPL plans to construct a new $40-$50m sub-station in the area by the second quarter of 2022 to handle "the significant capacity" coming from that station.

The utility also expects to complete the roll-out of its $30m nationwide AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) by next year's fourth quarter, having already selected the supplier and the network design for New Providence. It now awaits the arrival, as do many of its other project, of the funds from its $535m rate reduction bond (RRB) issue that should be placed imminently.

Dr Moxey said AMI will place control of consumption and billing back in the hands of consumers, while also enabling BPL to better manage a grid and transmission and distribution (T&D) infrastructure that has been made "smarter".

He added that BPL's new call centre should also be "fully on line" by 2021's second quarter as the utility moves to "establish the hours of operation with its unions" so it can be "more accessible to consumers".