Bahamas Power and Light (BPL) CEO Whitney Heastie admitted yesterday that while the company can improve its communication regarding load shedding, there are far more issues at hand as the company didn’t expect such high levels of load shedding this summer.
“It must be noted that the board appointed in 2017 and this current board have had a collective stint of just over 24 months. Those two boards met the following set of circumstances in place, a decaying generation fleet, with equipment up to 60 years old,” Heastie said during a press conference at BPL’s Clifton power plant.
“So, here is where we are generation fleet where parts could no longer be procured or could only be procured exclusively from manufacturers that have not been very responsive to our requests for help, a generation fleet where preventative maintenance was not the order of the day, a generation fleet that relied on costly fuel, and a generation fleet that, if action were not taken quickly, could in fact lead us to where we are today or worse.”
The CEO added that neither the time frame between those two boards, nor the circumstances that may have led to the change in boards, had an impact on that history.
He said it was the power company’s hope that with the help of the additional rental units from Aggreko, it would be in a position to prevent load shedding this summer.
He added that while BPL was cognizant of the tightrope it was walking, due to the pressure placed on the remaining plant, it did not anticipate this level of system failure.
“Our peak demand is 250 megawatts. We have a total of 210 megawatts available today, which includes the following: 105 megawatts in Aggreko rental capacity, 35 megawatts at Clifton Pier, and 70 megawatts from Blue Hills,” he said.
“This equates to 210 megawatts or 40 megawatts short of what is required, hence the load shedding.”
He said the company is working feverishly on returning two generators at the Blue Hills power station that will make up for this shortfall.
However, the company cannot guarantee that other units will not fail as it has no excess capacity.
Mr. Heastie assured that once the country gets deeper into the fall season, the demand will drop thus relieving the load shedding.
