By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

THE Bahamas Electricity Corporation's (BEC) frequent power outages were yesterday blasted as "outrageous" by a leading private sector figure, who said its "ridiculously expensive" and unreliable service was preventing the Bahamas' transformation into a "modern, productive economy".

While acknowledging that privatisation was not the only solution for BEC's ongoing problems, Chester Cooper, the Bahamas Chamber of Commerce and Employers Confederation's (BCCEC) chairman, told Tribune Business that the monopoly electricity supplier had to reduce outages and blackouts to the point where the focus could shift to reducing power costs.

Speaking out after business and residential consumers had to endure another almost three-hour island-wide disruption to BEC services, Mr Cooper said: "The business community finds the constant power outages outrageous, quite frankly.

"We cannot build a modern, productive economy or drive commerce this way. Electricity as an essential service is not only ridiculously expensive, it's grossly unreliable, too."

While privatisation remained one solution to BEC's problems, Mr Cooper said it was not the only option. He suggested that the first focus should be to address any management and technical deficiencies existing in the Corporation.

"I am on record already as saying that I do not believe that privatisation is the only answer to BEC's woes, although it should not be ruled out," the BCCEC chairman added.

"It will certainly be faster, and more effective, to immediately bridge whatever management or technical gaps there are in order to improve efficiency and reliability of the supply. It's being done in many countries; it can be done."

Former Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham, in an interview with Tribune Business in May 2008, floated the idea of privatising BEC once BTC's exercise was completed. That never happened, though, as the then-government's agenda was taken over by the global economic crisis and BEC's own fortunes spiralled downwards.

In its 2012 election manifesto, the FNM had appeared to commit to a fundamental restructuring of the Bahamian energy sector, through policies such as net billing and net metering, which would reduce consumers' power bills and allow renewable system users to sell surplus power back to the BEC grid.

Other ideas focused on making the Utilities Regulation and Competition Authority (URCA) the energy sector regulator, rather than the Government, and approving independent power producers (IPPs) to sell power to BEC from renewable energy facilities. It stopped short, though, of privatising BEC, which many regard as a natural monopoly, at least in distribution, hence the idea of splitting this from electricity production.

The newly-elected Christie administration is also offering similar things, particularly on renewable energy and net metering/billing, although it has stopped short of putting the industry under URCA's regulatory ambit. It is also, from a policy and ideological viewpoint, far less committed to outsourcing and privatisation than its FNM rival.

Mr Cooper, meanwhile, told Tribune Business yesterday: "We must get to a point of keeping the lights on consistently enough to shift the debate to what can be done strategically to lower the cost of electricity in the Bahamas. The cost of electricity, and having to invest in generators, is a key component to the high cost of living and doing business in the Bahamas.

"Today, for example, who pays for it when employees sit for two hours unable to be productive, waiting for the power to be restored? Who pays for the loss in revenues for that period? This has gone on long enough, to be fair."

BEC yesterday blamed a system surge that occurred at 8.14am for the New Providence island-wide outage that left thousands of customers without power until around noon.