Power outages rocked islands across The Bahamas over the weekend, leaving residents frustrated as high summer temperatures set in.
On New Providence, the implementation of load shedding led to outages in several communities.
On Friday, BPL cited the installation of a new transformer at the Fire Trail Substation as it noted the start of load shedding exercises.
Affected areas included Fire Trail Road West, Venice Bay Subdivision, Pine Barren Development Ltd., Corky Holdings, Bristol Cellars, Atavus Group Ltd and EML Holding, which were scheduled to be off from 7:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.
Lynden Pindling Estates was scheduled to be off from 8:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., while Rocky Pine Road, McKinney Drive, Palm Breeze Drive North and Butler Drive were scheduled to be off from 10:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.
BPL noted on Saturday that the transformer had been successfully installed and energized for load testing.
However, the areas remained impacted by rolling outages until the transformer was eventually brought online yesterday afternoon.
In western New Providence, on Friday evening, there was a separate outage that affected Cable Beach, Baha Mar Boulevard, Lake Cunningham Estates, Nautica and Skyline Drive.
Power was not restored until nearly four hours later, after 9 p.m.
Energy reform has been a key promise of the Davis administration, which included the signing of multiple LNG and solar power purchase agreements for islands across The Bahamas.
Another key component was the transfer of Bahamas Power and Light’s (BPL) transmission and distribution network assets to a newly formed company, Bahamas Grid Company (BGC), which would manage that side of the operations going forward.
This move was initially announced as a partnership with US-based Pike, but it has since been confirmed that the contract was ended.
Last week, officials said that major transmission and distribution projects on New Providence were approximately 95 percent complete.
Minister of Energy, Utilities and Aviation JoBeth Coleby-Davis claimed the $130 million network upgrade was delayed following the shooting death of a Pike Electric worker on March 21.
She said the incident created unexpected challenges, as work was not completed before higher summer energy demands.
“… One part of it is the fact that we are actually working in a time that was not part of our project timeline,” she said.
“So, our project timeline had us slated to be completed by the end of May.
“Unfortunately, the incident that occurred with the Pike employee had us delayed by eight weeks and because of that we are now having to complete our upgrades in a time period that also has extreme heat.”
On the Family Islands, the government has signed contracts for multiple microgrid projects, both LNG and solar.
As residents continue to await the start of those projects, however, some islands have been battling more frequent and prolonged outages.
Eleuthera, in particular, has been hard-hit by electricity challenges in recent years.
Over the weekend, Tarpum Bay seemed to be the most heavily impacted.
On Thursday, BPL noted that at 9:26 a.m. a blown high voltage fuse caused an outage in the community. Power was restored at 10 a.m., but at 10:35 a.m. one of the generation units at the Rock Sound Power Station tripped offline, resulting in the loss of power supply to Tarpum Bay. Power was again restored to the area at 11:09 a.m.
The unit tripped off again at 12 p.m. “due to over current and a blown fuse” again resulting in an outage in Tarpum Bay.
It is unclear when power was restored.
On Friday morning, however, BPL noted a new outage impacting south Eleuthera, from 11:32 a.m. to 12:43 p.m.
On Saturday morning, BPL reported another outage in Tarpum Bay due to a suspected fault on an overhead line.
Power was not restored until after 5 p.m.
Yesterday, at 7:45 a.m. BPL noted another outage in Tarpum Bay.
Power was restored to all residents after 12 p.m.
There were also outages elsewhere in Eleuthera over the weekend, including an emergency outage on Saturday to replace a blown cutout on the Hatchet Bay Power Station south feeder, which impacted Hatchet Bay, Governor’s Harbour, Palmetto Point and Savannah Sound.
There was also a separate isolated outage in Governor’s Harbour.
Abaco was also hard hit over the weekend.
On Friday, load shedding had to be implemented beginning at 11 a.m. for Central and North Abaco due to emergency repairs on a generation unit.
Power was restored at 6 p.m. to all areas except a portion of Treasure Cay, where load shedding continued.
On Little Grand Cay, load shedding also had to be implemented “due to high power demand”.
This schedule, with communities subject to rolling two-hour outages, continued until 7 p.m. Saturday.
On Saturday morning, there was also an emergency outage on Man-O- War Cay to remove a power transformer from the substation.
There was also a new outage, due to a downed power line, affecting Treasure Cay southward to Bahama Coral Island on Saturday evening.
Around 8:30 p.m. BPL advised that power had been restored to all areas except Treasure Cay.
At roughly 10 p.m. there was a separate outage affecting Murphy Town, Don McKay Boulevard, Pelican Shores, Sweeting Village, Spring City, Forest Drive, South Abaco, Lubbers Quarters and Tilloo Cay.
BPL said it was due to a technical issue affecting fuel supply at the Wilson City Power Station (WCPS).
It is unclear when power was restored to those areas, but at 12:46 a.m. on Sunday there was another outage affecting Murphy Town and Hope Town.
Load shedding had to be activated and BPL said consumers on Hope Town and Murphy Town feeders were taken offline.
Around 7:30 a.m. BPL noted that power had been restored to Matt Lowe’s Cay, Hope Town, Man-O-War Cay, and Scotland Cay.
Long Island also experienced outages over the past few days, beginning with an island wide blackout on Thursday evening.
BPL said the outage occurred at 7:52 p.m. and power was restored to customers in North Long Island at 8:13 p.m.
Power was restored from Millers to Deadman’s Cay at 8:51 p.m., BPL said, and as far as Scrub Hill by 9:05 p.m.
It was restored to the rest of the island at 10:41 p.m.
It remains unclear what caused the outage.
On Friday evening, BPL noted that load shedding might need to be implemented.
The area in northern Long Island, from Stella Maris to Seymours, had a power outage that night, with supply restored before 10 p.m.
Great Harbour Cay also had an outage on Friday morning to allow for emergency generation repairs.
Coleby-Davis said earlier this month that continued outages are part of the “growing pains” of the government’s energy reform efforts.
