The Bahamas Electrical Workers Union (BEWU) lambasted Bahamas Electricity Corporation (BEC) management Tuesday, claiming that management is attempting to mislead the public about the cause of the recent power outages which have affected New Providence.
In a press statement issued early Tuesday, union officials emphatically denied that they were in any way responsible for the numerous power failures that occurred over the weekend and into Monday.
“(Management’s) statement about an ‘ongoing investigation concerning the outages’ needs to be clarified. Their attempts to cast implications are out rightly devious,” the unionﾒs statement said.
“The simple truth is that the corporation is currently engaged in load shedding, due to the lack of generating capacity and down generators. Do you think this may be due to the poor decisions being made? When you have recently added 45 megawatts to your generating capacity how can you not have enough? Where is the planning?”
The workersﾒ union urged the public not to be “fooled” by what it called the attempts by corporation management to blame others for the outages, and called on the public to join with the union in “asking BEC to truthfully state the cause of the outages.”
In a press conference called at the corporationﾒs head office late Tuesday afternoon, BEC management acknowledged that the cause of the outages was in fact load shedding.
According to general manager Kevin Basden, however, the load shedding was made necessary not because BEC does not have sufficient generation capacity, but as a result of unforeseen events.
“These outages resulted from faults that developed on a couple of generators that were in service and this happened at the same time that we had a few other generators being repaired,” he said.
“In fact we can say that the major overhaul of all these generators, with the exception of one, has been completed.”
Mr. Basden said BEC is working feverishly to rectify the problems which led to the power outages, and he also apologised to the public for any inconvenience caused by the power problems.
Deputy general manager of engineering and planning Anthony Forbes said over the past few weeks the corporation has experienced an unacceptable level of faults at some of its major plants.
He said investigations conducted by BEC officials so far have revealed the cause of the faults and expressed confidence that the corrective steps taken will help to bring the corporationﾒs reliability up to a desirable level.
BEC officials said the corporationﾒs installed capacity is about 300 megawatts. The peak demand last year, officials said, was about 229 megawatts.
By: Darrin Culmer, The Bahama Journal
