The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE and JADE RUSSELL

Tribune Staff Reporters

BAHAMAS Power and Light CEO Shevonn Cambridge said if he had been involved in installing Wartsila’s engines in 2019, he likely would have agreed with the decisions his predecessors made, choices that have since had difficult consequences for the company’s ability to provide reliable power.

Mr Cambridge said the Wartsila engines are “somewhat compromised” and do not work as well as they would have worked if BPL had stuck with the original engine plans.

He said the reasons the plans were changed are complicated and reflect decisions made under intense pressure to provide reliable electricity.

His comments came after Prime Minister Philip “Brave” Davis said on Wednesday that the Wartsila engines “never worked properly” and described the situation as “rotten”.

Mr Cambridge was less harsh in his conclusion.

He said BPL’s initial plans to install four Wartsilla tri-fuel engines were disrupted when a fire erupted at Clifton Pier in 2018, destroying the plant’s two largest units.

 “When you lose your two largest engines at Clifton Pier in a fire,” he said, “they needed additional capacity immediately to replace the shortfall from BPL’s own plant.”

 Mr Cambridge said rather than put the four engines in a new station, BPL officials responded by putting them in a repurposed station along with three other machines.

 “They wound up putting seven engines in there,” he said. “Here’s the thing. You have time, you have capacity and you have cost issues.”

 He said officials did not build the system using an ideal “redundancy format”, instead installing “single systems”, “single fuel pump, single oil pump, single cooling oil system.”

 “You put new engines in, but the support systems were not built at the usual redundancies that you put as a base in those plants, and the cooling water system was not optimal or as the manufacturers wanted it to be,” he said. “And they also didn’t put in the fuel treatment equipment to facilitate the operation of the unit on HFO, which is why they wound up burning 33 per cent HFO as opposed to the 60 per cent what was envisioned when the plant was designed.

 “Because of the corners that were cut, so to speak, the performance of the plant was not what it would’ve been if it were installed by designed.”

 Mr Cambridge wants to stay out of the blame game and to avoid the politics surrounding electricity issues in The Bahamas.

 “I would like to think that under the circumstances, those were the best decisions to make,” he said.

 “I will say, given what we were going through or what the country was going through then, in terms of right after the fire and the four, eight-hour rolling blackouts, I cannot be critical of the decisions because I probably would have agreed with the decision.”