Officials of Bahamas Power and Light (BPL) and Bahamas Grid Company (BGC) appeared at a press briefing at the Office of the Prime Minister on Monday. This came after several blackouts occurred in New Providence following an island-wide outage last week.
BPL Chief Operating Officer Anthony Christie spoke about the expected challenges coming in the next two months. He said, “in August and September we’re gonna see higher loads so we’re trying to do certain things now to improve fields that have been offline for a while that would help some of the loading on the system. So hopefully, that will relieve and reduce some of the outages that we’re seeing but, again, I cannot predict or guarantee that we won’t have issues moving into the hotter more demanding months.”
Officials pointed to energy usage by consumers and the age of the system as two reasons for the increased pressure on the grid. BGC Chief Executive Officer Dareo McKenzie told reporters, “in most systems, as you go around the world, what you would see is what’s commonly referred to as a single peak load profile, right, where there load will potentially peak between 3 and 4 pm and continue at 9 to 10 pm and then come down. We’re very unique in New Providence, we have a double peak. What does that mean? It’s means that the system is under constant strain. There’s very little relief in terms of load.”
Unsanctioned connections was also highlighted as a cause of the pressure on the grid. BGC Chief Operating Officer Ryan Holder said, “a house may have 100 amp supply, you want to add additional air condition load, your electrician, himself, actually goes through the process of the Ministry of Works just actually upgrades your network to add your additional air condition that has additional load which is not visible to the utility company. And that creates problems in terms of overloads in the system.”
Officials urged consumers to conserve energy as much as possible.
