By RICARDO WELLS

Tribune Staff Reporter

rwells@tribunemedia.net

TALL Pines MP Leslie Miller yesterday admonished the Christie administration for surrendering the day-to-day management of Bahamas Power and Light (BPL) to PowerSecure, insisting that the move could hurt the Progressive Liberla Party (PLP) in the next general election.

Mr Miller spoke to The Tribune as thousands of Bahamians were left without electricity yesterday due to “outage rotations” by BPL to help offset the fact that corporation could not meet customer demand.

“They criticised us when we were there but we had it right,” Mr Miller said, referring to his time as chairman of the Bahamas Electricity Corporation, which was later renamed BPL.

“We had a plan for these summer blackouts and were executing it; by June we were going to have the cost of electricity down to 26 cents per kilowatt-hour. We had a agreement in place to purchase oil at $30 per barrel but we got stopped dead in our tracks because these foreigners thought they knew better.

“We had a plan in the works to have a fully operational 128 megawatt plant up and running by June of this year, we had the financing and a guaranteed loan from the National Insurance Board.”

Mr Miller said these plans were halted once the government decided that it would be better served by passing off the management of the corporation to the American firm.

“And they say they ‘believe in Bahamians’. The (management transition) was not necessary, the corporation is moving backward, but that’s ok, God don’t sleep. Election coming,” he told the Tribune.

Band-Aid approach

BPL, in a statement around noon yesterday, acknowledged that it was experiencing “generation challenges” at its power stations.

As a result, the corporation implemented a two-hour outage rotation schedule.

The move was also meet with contempt by former State Minister for Environment Phenton Neymour who suggested that the “Band-Aid like” fix has brought no resolution to the long-standing issues at the corporation.

Mr Neymour told The Tribune the government has intentionally misled the public on matters relating to BPL, despite knowing from the onset that the energy generation area of the corporation was operating on a “wing and a prayer”.

In addition to accusing the PLP of shamelessly adopting a scheme it had previously criticised, the former South Beach MP suggested the Christie administration was being disingenuous over what was spurring the recent rate reduction in power bills across New Providence.

Mr Neymour revealed that sources within BPL have noted the failure of one of its major generators at the corporation’s Blue Hill Road Power Station.

He alleged that the government, through the management of BPL, has entered into leasing agreements with foreign companies to rent out additional generators to offset the loss.

The Free National Movement (FNM), during its last stint in office, rented a number of generators to help with the load demands of New Providence.

In August, 2014, Mr Miller, then BEC chairman, said the FNM paid $750,000 a month to rent the generators, lamenting that the party would have been better served constructing a new plant at Clifton Pier.

“Instead, they spent money on that and on putting up plants in Family Islands like Abaco, Eleuthera and Bimini when those islands didn’t need them. If (Mr Neymour) was on top of everything like he tries to seem, he would have made some effort to try to put up a new plant in New Providence where it was necessary,” Mr Miller was quoted as saying.

Meanwhile, Mr Neymour yesterday scoffed at the fact that less than two years later this administration is in a similar situation.

“When I was in charge of BEC I went to the public, I was honest, I explained detail by detail why BEC need to raise its rates. I was ridiculed by the entire PLP. If they had stuck to the plans we had implanted at that point BEC would have been on a better footing,” Mr Neymour said.

“They are being deceitful on multiple fronts at the moment. Essentially BPL is relying more on rental generators now, than it is on the generators it owns because those generators (the ones owned BPL) are in such poor condition.

“That is why I stated it two years ago, the way in which the government is running BEC/BPL was unsustainable. They got breaks on fuel, dropping from $100 per barrel when we were in office to $30 per barrel recently and it has stabilised at $50 per barrel.

“They should have come honestly and told Bahamians as I attempted to do. Instead, the PLP perpetuated that the rate decreases were because of them. Attempting to deceive the people.

“How is it that they found a way to lower the rate and now there are rumblings about a rate increase? If this goes through, when one would have added all the smaller aspects of their bills - base rate, fuel charge, Value Added Tax and this new bond fee - electricity would be more expensive than it ever was under the FNM.”

Earlier this month BPL CEO Pamela Hill wrote a letter to customers detailing the need for a rate increase, suggesting that the company was unable to meet its responsibility due to the lack of finances to expand and develop its services.

It was later reported that Cabinet denied this request.