By Fay Simmons

Tribune Business Reporter

jsimmons@tribunemedia.net

A senior Bahamas Power & Light (BPL) executive yesterday said he expects one of the two offline units at Abaco’s Wilson City power plant to be repaired before August ends.

Anthony Christie, BPL’s chief operating officer, said the parts to repair one unit are expected to arrive from Brazil before the end of the week due to the shipment being speeded up to hasten repairs.

“Ongoing in Abaco, we have maintenance activities on two units at the Wilson City power station. The goal would be to restore one of those units before the end of this month. The other will be shortly thereafter. So, both units are being worked on in parallel,” said Mr Christie.

“We had some delays with parts coming from one of our vendors out of Brazil. They had to divert to an air shipment in order to get it there faster. So, we expect that to be in Abaco before the end of the week, and then they will continue to repair those units so that we’ll have enough generation to supply Abaco.”

Mr Christie added that the Abaco Cays should have improved generation “in the next week or two” due to the installation of three new Caterpillar generating units purchased for Man-O-War Cay, Hope Town and Guana Cay.

“A number of the cays would have been challenged whenever we have storm events, and we had some older back-up units on each of the cays. Presently, we have three units that would have landed a week ago, and they’re being dispatched,” said Mr Christie.

“One is already installed on Man-O-War Cay, two others are to be installed on Guana Cay, as well as Hope Town, in order to provide redundancy or back-up power whenever we have challenges from the mainland. So those customers will have more generation or more stable generation in the next week or two.”

Mr Christie said BPL still has “ongoing efforts” to improve generation capacity in Eleuthera, but declined to expand, hinting that an announcement from the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) was forthcoming.

“I don’t want to get into a lot of detail on Eleuthera. I think the OPM will make a statement on that coming up shortly. We do have ongoing efforts in Eleuthera that’s been stated to the public and everyone to-date, and that’s still ongoing,” said Mr Christie.

“Again, when we do have incidents, we address it as quickly as we can. Sometimes it’s related to more than one event or occurrence that causes us to have such extreme outages. But again, we do address it as soon as we can, and work there is ongoing, as in many places.”

Abaco residents and businesses had to endure multiple power outages over the past weekend after bad weather caused a fault on one of its two remaining in-service engines at the island’s main Wilson City power plant. The incident sparked the weekend’s load shedding, and BPL confirmed that 50 percent of the generation capacity at the Wilson City power plant is currently offline.

BPL, pledging that restoring service reliability in Abaco is its “highest priority”, said one of the offline engines is awaiting a replacement part from Brazil while the other is undergoing “a major overhaul” to leave just two of its four Wilson City units operational. The plant normally has a 51.2 MW peak load generation capacity.