The Tribune

By KEILE CAMPBELL

Tribune Staff Reporter

kcampbell@tribunemedia.net

BAHAMAS Grid Company will conduct infrared scans of its entire transmission and distribution network within weeks as it races to find electrical faults before they trigger outages and prepares to bring in additional skilled workers to bolster repairs.

The move comes after weeks of electricity interruptions across New Providence, including an outage that forced students to leave early at Anatol Rodgers High School yesterday.

BGC chief executive officer Dareo McKenzie said the company would use infrared scanning across the network to detect potential problems before they result in failures.

He said BGC also plans to increase its workforce and use its international partnerships to bring in additional skilled workers for overhead and underground lines within the next eight to ten weeks.

“That will definitely put us in a much better place,” Mr McKenzie said.

Mr McKenzie outlined the measures in a video posted to BGC's social media page, where he apologised for electricity interruptions over the past few weeks and acknowledged their impact on quality of life and businesses.

“We have a very short time in which we want to deliver the results that's required and that Bahamians deserve,” he said.

The latest interruption affected Anatol Rodgers High School yesterday, where an outage forced the school to dismiss students early.

In a notice, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology asked parents and guardians to collect their children immediately and advised that classes would resume as normal today.

The disruption followed months of repeated electricity interruptions across New Providence, including an island-wide blackout on July 30 after a transformer exploded at the Blue Hills Substation.

Bahamas Power and Light attributed the explosion to a suspected underground cable fault, with some communities left without electricity for seven hours or longer.

Three generators at BPL's Clifton Pier Power Station also tripped offline on September 4, causing widespread outages.

Electricity interruptions have affected commercial activity as well. Prolonged outages in August forced businesses in downtown Nassau to close or operate without power, with operators reporting lost sales, spoiled food and additional expenses.

Mr McKenzie described BGC as being at a “turning point”, having completed foundational projects and now shifting its focus towards improving the reliability and resiliency of the system.

He said the immediate priority is to normalise the electricity network by addressing existing faults involving underground cables and equipment.

Resolving those faults, he said, would give BGC greater operational flexibility and allow it to use contingency arrangements already built into the network when new problems develop.

Overseas cable specialists, known as splicers or jointers, were already working in the field this week to repair underground faults, Mr McKenzie said.

The Tribune reported on September 10 that BGC had reduced its backlog of known underground cable faults from 50 to 27 since taking over management of New Providence's transmission and distribution network in April 2025.

Mr McKenzie said at the time that an international specialist team had been deployed to tackle the remaining faults, some of which could require extensive excavation and replacement work.

Once the normalisation programme is completed, BGC plans to reconfigure, relocate and reuse existing assets, he said.

The company is also examining further modernisation measures, including supervisory control and data acquisition technology and system analysis designed to provide predictive information for future capital investment decisions.