Few entities are as critical to the functioning of modern life in The Bahamas as Bahamas Power and Light (BPL).

And of those entities, none is as great a disappointment and a poster child of gross government mismanagement as our national energy company.

The modern Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) has much to answer for with regard to BPL, but there is little hope it will accept accountability.

That is not to say that BPL, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Bahamas Electricity Corporation, was not also mismanaged by the Free National Movement (FNM) when it was last in power.

But the errors the current administration made that led us to the point we are at today are the result of squandering the taxpayer dollars invested by the last administration after the Bahamian people suffered through the circus-like antics of the previous executive regarding BPL.

After the Minnis administration bought nearly $125 million in new, permanent generation equipment, we are today still at the point where BPL cannot meet the demand of consumers on New Providence with recent load shedding occurring daily.

Despite the long and tortured history of the past 20 years of BPL, its consumers are paying exorbitant fuel charges and experiencing generation failure because of bad decisions made as the result of poor analysis and pandering to political sentiment by the government of the day, and specifically the Ministry of Finance.

And though we take no pleasure in being right, we clearly saw this coming.

During the first Christie-administration of 2002-2007, government had BEC, previously a profitable monopoly, reduce electricity tariffs, absorb fuel costs and take over the cost of street lighting on New Providence.

The effect was almost immediate, and BEC quickly began bleeding red.

The lack of cash meant a lack of generator maintenance, which meant equipment failure leading to blackouts, particularly during the high demand summer months.

The blackouts continued through the following Ingraham administration which proceeded to refinance hundreds of millions of dollars of BPL's debt, infuse it with cash, hike tariffs, allow BEC to pass along the fuel charge, and take over the cost of street lighting.

It was still not enough.

During the second Christie administration, then-Deputy Prime Minister Philip Davis, who was also minister of works and utilities, oversaw the creation of BPL.

Davis then handed over management of BPL to PowerSecure International, admittedly a reputable US company, that was given a lucrative contract to turn the power company around.

The Christie administration also included a rate reduction bond mechanism in the law to allow much of BEC's legacy debt to be settled and inject new cash for generation and transmission and distribution upgrades.

Under PowerSecure, there were still frequent blackouts during the summer months, BPL still bled money and the transmission and distribution network is critically challengedon New Providence to this day.

No rate reduction bond happened and the government still repeatedly bailed out BPL.

The Minnis administration came to power and fired PowerSecure, then it fired BPL's board in one of its many embarrassing moments.

Then a massive fire destroyed one major engine and sidelined another, prompting the government to pay a foreign company, Wartsila, to build a $95 million power plant inside Clifton Pier Power Station.

Then the government bought a $25 million GE diesel turbine for the Blue Hills Power Station.

Our generation woes were said to be solved, despite still relying on some rental generation.

In 2020, in one of the more sensible moves of the Minnis administration, BPL underwent a fuel hedge program.

It also set up a rate reduction bond, that did not really move, to inject BPL with cash and settle over $300 million in legacy debt.

The Davis administration came to power and failed to execute transactions under the hedge program.

It then pumped millions of taxpayer dollars into BPL to artificially manipulate the fuel charge, which eventually all came to crash as the government could no longer sustain BPL, which still cannot sustain itself.

The cash crunch led to higher fuel charges and a lack of critical generator maintenance during the winter months in preparation for the high demand of summer.

What we have now are exponentially higher fuel bills and a generation system that cannot meet demand to prevent daily blackouts.

We predicted we would all pay dearly and, sadly, here we are.

The Davis administration and Minister of Works with responsibility for BPL Alfred Sears have failed us and have prolonged the unending misery BPL has brought us.

The post The unending misery of BPL appeared first on The Nassau Guardian.

The post The unending misery of BPL appeared first on The Nassau Guardian.

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