Bahamas Power and Light (BPL) CEO, Pamela Hill tackled the issue of the recent frequent power outages around the country yesterday in a press conference at the company’s Baillou Hill Road headquarters.

As this summer continues to report temperatures in the triple digits, reaching as far as 107 degree Fahrenheit, the constant power cuts so far this summer have been described by many as “unbearable”.

Ms. Hill insists the main cause of the power cuts is the issue of maintenance of the company’s power plants.

“When I say a maintenance issue meaning that there has something that has been fundamentally wrong with the power plant with the unit that’s gone out. Some of these units are fairly old, others are not that bad,” she explained.

“But when we have an outage, it is not because we don’t have enough generation. When we look around where our fleet is situated, when we count them up, there’s enough. There’s more than enough in terms of steel on the ground to provide power,” Ms. Hill added.

“So the reason that we’ve been having the service interruptions of late is because of the outages that have been happening with the plant,” she said.

Meanwhile, the CEO said consumers can expect some relief in the near future, as she insisted that “restoring power is not hard”.

BPL is also looking to bring online a plant that recently went offline; and according to Ms. Hill, this should be up and running by next week.

She noted that as a short term fix, the company has rented additional generators that should be on stream shortly.

Addressing whether BPL is doing enough to prevent the outages from occurring, the CEO assured that there is an active maintenance plan.

“So what we do is weekly, and if not more frequently, we do a walk down of our units. Because we know that we’ve had a significant number of outages, for those plants that seem to be in a more precarious situation, we’ll go more than weekly to do a visual inspection of them,” she said.

“While taking out one part for example, might be down, look to see if there are other areas that are also weak in that unit and get ahead of that so we can prevent something from flaring up. And then for our units that are newer and stronger, then a weekly visual maintenance schedule makes sense,” she added.

Ms. Hill said that in the long term, the company is hoping to enhance and its communication with its customers through social media and current forms of technology.