By EARYEL BOWLEG

Tribune Staff Reporter

ebowleg@tribunemedia.net

WORKS and Utilities Minister Alfred Sears said there would “possibly” be more load shedding this summer.

However, Bahamas Power & Light CEO Shevonn Cambridge said some recent outages have wrongly been classified as load sharing.

Their comments came after BPL confirmed on Monday that it started load-shedding exercises because of challenges to several power stations in New Providence.

During an Office of the Prime Minister press briefing, Mr Sears said the generation challenges result from “band-aid” solutions to problems that require significant investments.

 “In the absence of what experts estimate to be $500m plus injection, BPL continues to work extremely hard to keep its ageing infrastructure afloat albeit with intermittent challenges on both its generation and transmission and distribution networks,” Mr Sears said.

 “The question that looms the largest in the minds of the Bahamian public is whether there will be more load shedding this summer. The shortest answer and most direct answer is possibly. However, the company is putting all its resources behind preventing that from happening.”

 Mr Sears said that while New Providence’s generation demand has never exceeded 263MW, peak summer load may exceed 270MW –– more than BPL has operable.

 “On the surface, it appears that BPL has sufficient generation to meet the peak demand,” he said. “However, we are talking really about machines. Just like any appliance or machinery we have in our homes or businesses, the potential exists for them to break down. The loss of more than one engine at any given time puts BPL in a precarious position where it may not be able to meet the demand of the entire island.”

“BPL already relies on rental generation that contributes 83MW per hour to the total output for New Providence, and by the end of next week, an additional 33MW will be added to the rental generation fleet. Also, plans to return a BPL 20MW unit to service early next month are progressing satisfactorily, which will give the company a total of 53MW of additional generation capacity of its current standing.”

 Officials anticipate that by mid-July, BPL will have almost 323MW in available generation capacity, which Mr Sears said is “well beyond” what will be required in normal circumstances during the peak period.

 However, he said rental units are not a long-term solution.

 Former BPL chairman Donovan Moxey said in 2019 that seven new multi-fuel engines at one of BPL’s plants would bring “an end to load shedding” and that the facility would “help make load shedding a thing of the past”.

 Asked about this, Mr Cambridge answered: “So the Wartsila engines are an interesting thing and the easiest way to put it is that we got new engines, but those engines are being supported by older auxiliaries.”

 “And so just like everything else, you’re about as strong as your weakest link and so now the plan is to try and upgrade the auxiliaries that are supporting those Wartsila engines.”

 “Over the last two weeks or whatever, I’m sure as many of you would realise, we had a lot of weather activity, and we had a number of lightning strikes as well as other things. Some of the outages that have been classified as load shedding from the public view are not load shedding,” he said.

 “As a matter of fact, I saw a copy of our plan maintenance schedule being circulated on certain media sources as load shedding. You have outages that will occur as a result of weather-related events. We still have third-party caused outages that occur — people running into poles and the like. And then we have our planned maintenance.”