My fellow Bahamians, good evening.
In October 2022, when I first spoke to you in detail about BPL, I did not leave the harsh reality of the state of our electricity infrastructure and the hundreds of millions needed to fix our aging systems to someone else.
I came before you myself, because the buck stops with me.
Ever since, I have been honest about the scale of this challenge.
In April of 2025, I stood in the House of Assembly and gave this country the most complete accounting of our energy system that any government had ever given.
I did not soften it then, and I will not soften it now.
I told the nation that we had inherited a power grid and a generation system on life support, barely hanging on.
Bahamas Power and Light was carrying more than half a billion dollars of debt, and another hundred million in unfunded pension obligations. $600 million in total, on the shoulders of a company that could not pay for its own repairs.
Engineers told us we needed $500 million in critical upgrades to prevent a complete failure of our electrical infrastructure.
Not an inconvenience. A collapse.
We were running twenty-nine power stations across seventeen islands.
Different manufacturers.
Different eras.
Some engines so old that no one still makes the parts to fix them.
More than sixty percent of the generation equipment in New Providence needed replacing.
In the Family Islands, that number was eighty percent.
And to keep the lights on at all, we rented engines for over forty million dollars a year.
Renting.
Money out the door, and not one dollar of it buying an asset we would own at the end.
My fellow Bahamians,
The system we inherited was not designed for the country we have become.
Some of the equipment and cables were installed and laid down pre-independence, and a lot of it is more than a generation old.
Every government since has added to it.
No government before us took the bold position to rebuild a system that was made for the 21st century, taking into account rising temperatures, more violent and destructive hurricanes, and an economy that is growing faster than the time needed to complete the upgrades.
Big changes are underway, the country is still quite a way from that reality – tonight I’m going to describe how we go from where we are now to a system that supports our families, businesses, and a better, bigger economy.
The Energy system is made up of two separate, but connected parts:
- Generation and;
- Transmission and Distribution
Therefore, adding more generation does not, by itself, keep your lights on.
Generation is the engine.
Transmission and distribution are the poles, the wires, the substations, the transformers and the cables that carry that power from the generators to your street and into your home.
You can have every engine in the fleet running perfectly, and if an overhead or underground cable fails or a transformer catches fire at a substation, the lights will go out.
That is what happened on the thirtieth of July.
A transformer failure at the Blue Hills substation took the whole island down.
It was not a shortage of engines.
An underground cable fault caused the fire at a critical transformer.
With an overhead line fault, a crew can often see.
With a fault underground, they cannot.
They must trace it, section by section, street by street, sometimes by excavation. That is why that particular repair took days instead of hours.
It is not an excuse.
It is an explanation, because you are entitled to know why – although it does not ease the misery we all felt.
These challenges are compounded by the global heat wave we have been experiencing because of El Niño.
The demand on the system has broken our previous peak twice this season.
Heat not only raises demand and increases the strain on the equipment; it accelerates its deterioration.
We are operating an old system in a new climate reality.
And we do this on a chain of islands in the path of an increasingly violent hurricane season, in a world where energy supply chains are strained, and traditional short-term lead items have become long-term lead items and long-term lead items have become longer-term lead items as governments around the world race to upgrade their energy infrastructure.
This is our climate reality. This is our geographic reality.
It is not a complaint. It is the terrain on which we are building.
As I stated earlier, parts of the system were built before Independence.
It was built for a smaller population, a smaller economy, and a different climate.
We achieved political Independence more than fifty years ago. Now energy security must become part of our economic independence.
I do not say this to point fingers.
The responsibility to act is ours.
We are not here to manage decline.
We are not here to defend the status quo.
We are transforming the whole system — generation, fuel, transmission, distribution, metering, finance, and governance.
What we inherited is not what we will leave behind.
Now, I could have managed Energy the way it has always been managed.
Rent another engine.
Patch another cable.
Get through one more summer and hand the problem to whoever comes next.
That is what was done for decades.
I refused to do it.
A crisis is an opportunity to fix what does not work.
And we chose to fix it.
For the first time in our history, this country has a comprehensive, nationwide plan to modernise how we generate, store and distribute electricity across the whole archipelago. That plan is not a press release. It is under construction right now.
We separated generation from transmission and distribution, because that is how serious energy systems around the world are run.
Bahamas Grid Company was established to take on New Providence’s transmission and distribution, and it has delivered a $130 million foundational upgrade to the grid.
That work includes stronger steel poles, larger conductors, modern protection devices, fibre communications, a looped transmission system, and three new high-voltage substations.
In July, those substations had reached mechanical completion and entered final testing and commissioning.
That work produced measurable results.
Outage frequency in New Providence fell forty-five percent against the historic average. Outage duration fell thirty-five percent, including during major weather events.
On ordinary days, close to half on both measures.
Smart devices prevented tens of thousands of interruptions you never experienced, because they never happened.
Bahamas Grid Company is today a fully Bahamian-led utility, under Bahamian management, accountable to this country. That is as it should be.
In 2025, the foundational work was associated with a 45 percent reduction in outage frequency and a 35 percent reduction in outage duration compared with historical averages.
Those gains are real.
But the outages Bahamians are experiencing now are also real.
The lesson is not that the earlier work failed.
The lesson is that the upgrade is not yet complete, that reliability has not improved evenly in every community, and that an old and overstressed system can still lose ground when demand rises, or critical equipment fails.
That is why our plan reaches beyond the grid.
At BPL, the work has been just as hard and far less visible. Generators that were unused or idle have been brought back.
A rotor replaced.
A major overhaul completed; turbochargers rebuilt.
Alternators repaired.
Engines returned to service one after another this year, each adding to the margin between you and a load-shedding schedule.
We executed a fuel hedge in December, two and a half million barrels, a full year of protection, so a war on the other side of the world does not impact your light bill the way it would have if we had not executed the hedge.
And the Equity Rate Adjustment saved consumers $11.5 million last year.
One in five residential customers paid no base rate charge at all.
We signed agreements to bring liquefied natural gas into this country, a cleaner and cheaper fuel than the heavy oil we have burned for generations.
We have twenty-three microgrid and solar projects in development across the Family Islands, close to two hundred megawatts of new generation, with Bahamian companies as partners on almost every project.
The world has noticed.
Moody’s upgraded our credit outlook twice in the span of one year, after not doing so in nearly two decades, and cited our energy reform as one of the major reasons.
That is how a crisis becomes an opportunity: we stop spending only to survive the next emergency and start investing to prevent the next emergency.
BPL will continue restoring dependable generation while moving from rented, temporary units to permanent, efficient capacity.
Critical overhauls must be completed.
Maintenance must be planned from reliable asset data.
BPL must integrate and expand battery storage systems.
And rental generation must be phased out only when replacement capacity is tested and ready.
BGC must complete and test the foundational grid work.
The new substations must be commissioned.
The transmission loop, switching capacity, protection systems, and control technology must be completed.
Weak feeders must be rebuilt, and grid-readiness work must keep pace with new solar and generation projects.
A power plant cannot help a customer if the grid cannot deliver the power.
On generation, capacity is returning now.
Blue Hills GT2, out since the spring, is coming back. The battery storage system that shaves our evening peak returns to service.
Two Clifton Pier engines are scheduled to be back before the end of September.
The Blue Hills turbine under major inspection returns in the first quarter of next year.
In January we begin phasing out forty megawatts of rented generation, because permanent capacity will have replaced it.
On the network, the substation equipment, switchgear and high-voltage assets that failed this summer are being replaced, not patched.
Remote monitoring goes live at Clifton Pier this year, and Blue Hills is next, so faults are diagnosed by data rather than discovered by darkness.
On fuel, the first phase of liquefied natural gas comes online this year, scaling to 190 megawatts of gas-fired capacity by late 2027, with new pipelines replacing a pipeline more than forty years old.
The combined cycle plants at Blue Hills will be commissioned during 2027 and 2028.
We will be able to produce power at a fraction of today’s fuel cost.
My fellow Bahamians, new engines, cables, transformers, solar and battery equipment alone will not save a company that is not run properly.
And I will not stand here and ask you for patience while ignoring what needs fixing on the inside.
Last year BPL spent approximately twenty million dollars on overtime despite the fact all transmission and distribution work is the responsibility of BGC.
In a single twelve-month period, three employees in one department received more than $600,000 in overtime between them.
One record shows an individual claiming eighteen hours on Christmas Day, then twenty-four hours each of the next three days that followed.
Ninety hours across four consecutive days.
The overwhelming majority of BPL’s workers are decent, skilled Bahamians who keep our lights on and go out in storms when the rest of us are told to stay inside.
They have my respect and my thanks. This is not about them.
This is about a system that permitted this type of abuse.
A failure of management, of controls, of oversight, going back many years and across administrations.
It is not credible that a person works twenty-four hours straight, three days running, and does safe work.
It is not fair to the ratepayer, who funds every dollar.
And it is not fair to the honest worker, whose profession is tarnished by it.
A new overtime policy is in force.
Planned overtime is capped.
Any technical worker whose overtime exceeds thirty percent of base salary triggers a review by the division head and the executive management team and is reported to the board.
Repeat patterns are flagged.
We will apply this consistently and fairly, and we have engaged the unions, because their members deserve a properly run company as much as any customer does.
Every dollar recovered from waste is a dollar available for a spare part, a repair crew, new equipment and training.
We will put more information and more energy choices in the hands of customers.
Advanced meters can help identify outages faster and show households when and how they use electricity.
We will accelerate modern metering so that Bahamians can manage consumption instead of waiting until the end of the month to be surprised by a bill.
And we will create greater flexibility for residential solar.
In consultation with URCA, BPL, consumer groups, and Bahamian solar installers, we will review the rules governing residential renewable-energy systems.
Our objective is clear: simpler applications, predictable approval times, wider access to bi-directional meters, fair treatment of the energy a household produces, and appropriate credit for excess power supplied to the grid.
My fellow Bahamians, I am not going to stand here and tell you that every light will stay on tomorrow.
What I will tell you is this.
I know the scale of what we are dealing with. I have known it since the day I took office, and I have never once described it as smaller than it is.
There will be setbacks.
There will be equipment failures.
There may be temporary disruption as old infrastructure is removed, and new systems are connected, and as we build a more resilient system to survive and operate in the climate realities we face every year.
But difficulty is not a reason to retreat.
It is a reason to work harder, move faster, and communicate more honestly.
I am not here to manage this.
I am here to fix it.
I said in Parliament that we will not accept the status quo; I meant it then, and I mean it now.
Righting this ship requires more than engines and cable.
It requires a utility properly governed, staffed, financed, and held to account.
It requires management that answers for performance.
That work is under way.
It will not be comfortable, and it will not always be popular.
But it is the only route to a country where the power is stable, reliable and inexpensive.
My fellow Bahamians, you returned this Government to office, and you did not do so to keep things exactly as they were.
You gave us a mandate to build on progress and to confront the problems that others found too difficult or too costly to solve.
You elected us to build.
To build a grid that can carry the country we are becoming. To build generation we own instead of generation we rent. To build a utility that serves you rather than simply trying to survive. An energy system on which a young Bahamian can open a business, a mother can keep the fridge running, and an elder can sleep through a summer night.
This is the hardest infrastructure challenge our country has faced in fifty years of independence.
It sat for decades because leaving it was easier. We took it on because you deserve a government prepared to do the difficult thing rather than the convenient one.
We will finish what we started. Not because it will be easy, but because the alternative is another generation of Bahamians living in the dark and being told to wait.
You have waited long enough. What we inherited is not what we will leave behind.
Thank you. Good night.
May God bless you and the Commonwealth of The Bahamas.
