Five years ago, the PLP promised energy reform. Five years later, Bahamians are suffering from the catastrophic meltdown of the country’s electrical infrastructure, coupled with skyrocketing electricity bills.
The state of electricity in The Bahamas today: Bahamians have never paid so much to their power provider while getting so little power in return.
Unlike the FNM’s approach to privatization, the PLP’s privatization scheme for New Providence’s electrical grid involved no competitive bidding. Instead, the Davis administration handpicked a newly formed company called Bahamas Grid Company (BGC) to receive hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bahamas Power & Light (BPL) assets and the right to charge energy consumers for the management of an aging electrical grid network (the grid) responsible for transmitting and distributing power from BPL’s generators to Bahamian homes and businesses. Our Party Leader has previously gone on record in calling on the Davis administration to disclose the identities of this select group of private equity investors in BGC.
Sources within BPL indicate that the primary cause behind this summer’s catastrophic power outages is electrical faults within the grid. These sources assert that BGC does not have the expertise on staff to repair the numerous electrical faults and are frantically reaching out to BPL employees in a bid to hire them, on cheaper terms than they currently enjoy at BPL, to fix the myriad of problems associated with the BGC-controlled and operated grid. Moreover, these sources allege that urgent attention is needed not just for the sake of consumers seeking a reliable electricity supply, but also for the safety of those who come into contact with the grid, which they advise is in some cases literally being held together with tape.
Making matters worse, due to the exit of Pike, BGC’s former partner in the privatization deal to manage the grid, BGC has lost the benefit of Pike’s extensive global reach in the energy industry, which allowed the acquisition of hard to find replacement parts at much cheaper pricing. With Pike and their workers gone and no BPL linesmen agreeing to leave BPL for BGC, BGC literally lacks the manpower to do the job of effectively managing the grid. Each time the grid fails, BGC must ask BPL to provide the linesmen needed to do the grid repair work that BPL consumers are paying BGC millions of dollars for every month. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that the public is paying unnecessarily higher energy bills because of the Davis administration’s decision to reward a select group of wealthy investors with a no-bid deal to supply a service that they are presently unequipped to provide.
With residential and business customers incurring such extensive losses as a result of BGC’s failure to provide reliable electricity, coupled with the skyrocketing increase in their monthly electricity bills, the public is entitled to know what penalties BGC is obligated to pay under the terms of its contract with the government, as a result of its failure to perform.
I join our Party Chairman in calling for the Prime Minister, Energy Minister Colby-Davis, as well as executives of BPL and BGC to hold open town hall meetings on the true state of the electricity infrastructure and its maintenance on New Providence and our Family Islands.
The public deserves transparency from the government on its deal with BGC. Power outages and high energy bills are not merely inconveniences: Lives and businesses suffer when electricity supply is grossly unreliable and its cost is far greater than most can bear.
Dr. S. André Rollins
Shadow Minister of Energy, Utilities and Aviation
MP, Long Island