By ANNELIA NIXON

anixon@tribunemedia.net

Bahamas Power & Light (BPL) yesterday said Harbour Island endured a planned outage so a 2.5 mega watt (MW) generation unit could be installed to meet demand ahead of the island’s regatta.

“In our effort to improve reliability in Harbour Island and on mainland Eleuthera, BPL is continuing its generation expansion exercise in these communities,” BPL statement told Tribune Business in a statement. “On Sunday, October 6, 2024, BPL executed a planned outage to facilitate the first phase of the connection of a 2.5 MW unit to Harbour Island’s grid.

“The second phase of the connection is scheduled to take place before the end of the week. The new unit will increase the total installed capacity on Harbour Island to 8.5 MW, including the 6 MW of rental generation. The installation and testing will be completed ahead of the popular Harbour Island Regatta that is scheduled to take place on the National Heroes Day holiday weekend of October 11-14.

“Not only will the new unit allow us to meet our peak demand during this period but it will also bolster overall generation reliability on Harbour Island going forward. We plan to install another 2.5 MW unit at the Harbour Island power station before the end of the year.”

Briland residents said that since their protest for better water and power services in the summer they have seen great improvement with the utilities. Jamal Johnson, a Harbour Island resident, said those who are still complaining are ungrateful.

“They are very ungrateful,” he began. “I must say. And I live here. The power outages has been limited and the water outages have been limited. The last time I cut my water pump to bathe was, I can recall maybe sometime almost in the early part of September and, going over a month or six weeks without doing that, I have no need to complain.

“Some people just want to say some stuff. They just want to have something to say. But the Government has been improving. They’ve been on the ground. They’ve been trying to put the generators and the water situation to make it better for the people on the island.”

Mr Johnson added that power has been “stable” for the most part . “They’ve been doing some work and it’s been stable,” he said. “Last night the power was off because they sent a notification that they’re still in the process of doing upgrades.

“And since they had that walk out a couple of months ago, the power has been stable. I can speak to that. Very little outages. Yesterday the power has been off for like three, four hours because they were putting in some new equipment, upgrading because of the weekend coming.

“Well, I’m not going to say BPL and Water & Sewerage is 100 percent, but you have to start somewhere and the problem is not going to be done overnight. But they are moving in the direction of making them better because from the last month or two,” Mr Johnson added. “From that point to where I was talking about issues, the power and the water has been improved.

“And improved being that it’s better, but it’s not finalised, is not finished. Improved means that it went from one point to another point where it’s moving forward. So the issue and the problems that we’ve been facing have been partially corrected. And it’s been doing good since that time up to now. So they gave us a timeframe of everything is going to be up and running.

“But, like I said, it is yet to be seen because we’re now in the down season where all the capacities of all the houses and hotels are empty. And from November, December when the island is full again, that’s when there’ll be another test to see if the work that BPL and Water and Sewerage been doing since July to August.... we’ll see if that will hold.”