Former Minister of State for Energy Phenton Neymour says far from praising the performance of Bahamas Power and Light (BPL) in reducing the cost of electricity, Deputy Prime Minister Philip Davis must come clean on the true reason the cost of electricity is down. According to Neymour, it has nothing to do with BPL. And despite the deputy prime minister's optimism, Neymour predicted "a hot summer".

Neymour also demanded that the BPL business plan -- for which a sum of "around $900,000" was paid, according to the Christie administration -- be made public.

"The Bahamian people, since they paid for a business plan, need to see the business plan. And they also need to see this contract signed with PowerSecure," Neymour said.

The existence of BPL is the culmination of the Christie administration's chosen path regarding the privatization of the Bahamas Electricity Corporation (BEC). The administration initially set out to privatize BEC, but backlash -- no doubt fueled by the perception of poor performance by Cable and Wireless Communications and the political price paid by the Ingraham administration for privatizing the Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) -- pushed the administration to choose a different course.

The government decided to bring in a management company and to create a special purpose vehicle to run the business of electricity generation and distribution, but leave the ownership of the assets in BEC's name.

The administration eventually settled on PowerSecure International and signed a management services agreement withPowerSecure on February 8. That agreement was based on a draft business plan submitted by PowerSecure in late 2015, after the government signed a transition agreement with PowerSecure and paid the company "around $900,000", in the words of the deputy prime minister.

Neymour told The Nassau Guardian yesterday he was shocked by Davis' assertions that falling electricity prices are the result of anything attributable to BPL.

"Clearly, the deputy prime minister is trying to insult our intelligence, after all the new CEO of BPL has only been in The Bahamas literally a matter of days... And in my opinion, BEC, or Bahamas Power and Light, is in the worst operational state in its history," he said.

BPL CEO Pamela Hill has just taken office, after being selected to replace Jeff Wallace who resigned unexpectedly a little more than a month ago, citing personal reasons.

Taking Davis' claim that under BPL the price of electricity has been 40 percent lower, Neymour pointed out that today's price is 22 cents per kilowatt hour (kwH), and said that when the FNM left office, that price was 26 cents -- a decrease of 17 percent.

"Yet the price of oil has decreased by approximately 60 percent, which clearly shows that BEC's performance has not improved but in fact gotten worse.

"The deputy prime minister has intentionally failed to say that the reduction in the total price of electricity is entirely due to the decrease in the price of crude oil on the international market. In fact the BPL fuel charge should be following the decrease of crude oil on the international market," he said.

According to Neymour, there are clearly some operational inefficiencies at BPL.

"For instance, today the Clifton Pier power plant is operating at less than 50 percent of its efficiency: In other words, it is producing less than 50 percent of the power it was designed to produce.

"In addition, the rental generators that normally were rented just for the summer -- which I was heavily criticized for renting -- this government began to do the same last year, and because of (BEC's) poor condition, in fact, they kept those generators over the winter months. In other words, they needed them in the lowest demand period. That is how bad a state they are in," he said.

Neymour said going into the summer, when it is likely BPL will need additional rental generators, the utility is relying primarily on rental generators and the Blue Hills power station, which is far more expensive to run than Clifton Pier.

"So BEC is in its worst condition. The summer months are coming, and they should now prepare themselves and expect that there may be some load-shedding going into the summer," Neymour said.

K. Quincy Parker, Guardian Business Editor

Click here to read more at The Nassau Guardian