By Shamar Blunt
Managing Director of Abed’s, Eddy Abed, wants to see more being done by government and other stakeholders to stabilise the island’s energy grid in order to minimise future island-wide blackouts.
The businessman said despite assurances from the Barbados Light & Power Company (BL&P) over the last few years that the island’s electricity grid was being strengthened, blackouts have unfortunately continued to negatively impact businesses.
His comments came 24 hours after an island-wide power outage on Tuesday resulted in some businesses closing prematurely.
“We’ve seen that Light and Power had said in the past that this would never happen again, that they would put the necessary safety procedures in place, that it would be isolated to a region [or] parish… Yesterday has shown that whatever they have done has not been successful.
“Not only businesses, people in their homes, guests, other individuals suffered badly through this yesterday through the loss of productivity… I would hate to think that we [would] have to go through this again. I am appealing to the authorities to make sure that this is the last island-wide [outage]. Absolutely I am aware that there would be other outages, but it need not be island-wide.”
While noting that this has not been the only widespread blackout not caused by a storm in recent memory, Abed said the business community has recognised, over the years, the need to implement back-up generation systems, but sadly such a move is not always financially viable.
“The power outage yesterday is not the first that we have had, we have had several in the past that have affected Bridgetown. There are businesses who have taken the necessary mitigating factors into consideration and installed generators; those, by and large, are medium to larger-sized businesses that own their own properties.
“Those who are renting don’t have the luxury of installing a generator because the landlord may not give them permission or it requires special wiring which they don’t want to entertain,” he explained.
Barbados experienced significant outages on November 18 and 19 in 2019 and December 2021, which were said to be associated with contaminated fuel and ageing generator equipment.
“Sadly the knock-on effect of the power outage, is that although businesses were affected where they had to close for a time period, you had parents [employees] who were called to go to daycare schools to pick up their children because the electricity was off, there was no water running. So the effect is not only a two-dimensional one where you see the businesses being affected…It goes beyond that,” Abed added.
