BAHAMAS: BPL Press Statement on Weekend Outages

#Nassau, August 7, 2019 – Bahamas – The Bahamas Power and Light Company Ltd. (BPL) wishes to apologize to our customers for the power outages of this past weekend. We recognize the inconvenience such outages cause to our community, and we are working diligently to address the issues raised by aging infrastructure and a transmission and distribution grid in need of an upgrade.

While we are still investigating the causes for the outages, we can confirm that three of our major generation assets were out of service, which exacerbated the challenges we are facing during the summer months. The failure of these assets extended the periods of load shedding which we were forced to undertake. BPL Management would like to thank the Generation team for their continuing hard and brilliant work as they seek to return these assets to the grid.

We would like to assure our customers that we are vigorously pursuing every available course of action to address these obstacles, in particular the Rate Reduction Bond process, which will allow BPL to access a much-needed capital infusion at this critical time in our ongoing development.

We take this moment to look forward to the completion of the 132 Megawatt power plant at Station A before the end of the year. The ability of the new station to provide baseload generation will allow us to address some of the issues mentioned earlier, and will help BPL provide stable, reliable electricity to our customers in a safe and more affordable manner.

Thank you.