The Chief Executive Officer of Bahamas Power and Light (BPL)  Whitney Heastie said yesterday that there will be no load shedding this summer,  but there is no guarantee of no outages. 

Mr. Heastie said the company has spent a lot of time preparing for this upcoming summer which he anticipates will be a better summer compared to summer of last year.

He said, “we’ve spent a lot of time working certainly on the generation side.  I think historically we have been deficient in generation. We have spent a lot of time over the past 6 or 7 months working the generation assets.

“We’re not where we want to be quite frankly and we  still got some work to do,  but I think given where we are and  from whence we came,  I think we’re well on our way to making sure we can supply the loads that we will need for this summer.”

Mr. Heastie  said  that they are studying the system to understand what needs to be fixed before they can come up with an estimate to fix the issue and prevent an island wide blackout from occurring again, but the system he said is a very complex one that will take some time. 

“The grid out there is  pretty comprehensive. If  you look at the poles and the wires just around New Providence within itself,  it’s a pretty complex system. We’ve got 21 major substations and that’s just the major primary substations  in New Providence,  not talking about the secondary substations and so from the generating facility to those substations,  which is the transmission lines and then from the substations to the various users which is the distribution network.

“It’s a fast network and so what we have to do is look at each one of those systems which is more that 210 circuits just off of those 21 primary substations and understand what has to be done to make sure the appropriate action is taken,” Mr. Heastie said.

He also explained the reason behind the island wide black out that plagued the island on Monday.

Mr. Heastie confirmed that BPL officials have begun analysis in hopes of discovering what the exact cause of that outage was in regards to the equipment that was hit by a lightening bolt and subsequently failed as a result, but those results he said,  are preliminary.   

“The network or the grid is designed really to isolate fault depending on where the fault occurs and the magnitude of the fault, because this fault happened directly inside the power plant.  It had a magnitude that was very severe. 

“In simple terms, if something were to happen further away from the plant,  then the plant would have had a faster time to react. The closer it is to the plant results in the response to the protection system having to be a whole lot faster,” Mr Heastie said.