Nary a hope in the near future of reduced electricity bills?
Government’s Senator Jepter Ince has been offering some defence of the Barbados Light &?Power Co. Ltd (BL&P). He says of Barbadians: “We required a Mercedes Benz from BL&P and when the time came to pay the road tax and insurance, you do not want to pay, but you want to drive the Benz.
“You cannot do it. It cannot work!”
Making the best of Senator Ince’s skewed analogy, the people of Barbados never demanded luxury of the BL&P only efficiency and reasonable pricing.
There must be something fundamentally wrong when an electricity bill can show its fuel charge to any single consumer to be more than twice what the energy cost is for any one period.
Even more wrong is the lack of a clear and straight explanation why the BL&P opted, as Senator Ince suggested, to use jet fuel in five per cent or more of its power processing. The senator’s attempt at appeasing the BL&P’s expansive clientele, even if couched in bombast was undermined by feeble argument.
Said he: “Jet fuel is one of the most expensive fuels you can think about. There is no guessing. If your capacity of jet fuel usage is five per cent or above . . . you are going to see a spiral in your bill.”
Senator Ince would have us resigned to the notion that fuel, an ingredient of the power production of the BL&P, should now be embraced by consumers as an input and an additive for surcharge at the same time.
Not too long ago, when its new generating plant at Spring Garden was going up, the BL&P’s management boasted that the ultramodern system would reduce the cost of electricity to Barbadians. Instead, electricity costs to the Barbadian consumer have kept rising – until the current ridiculous state.
Barbados, like the rest of the world, is experiencing challenging economic times, a period marked by frugality, restraint, patience and sacrifice.
In such circumstances the Barbados Light & Power, a private monopoly, Canadian-controlled, appears content to glory in its latest annual profit of $54 million, while passing on incurred jet fuel costs by choice to hard-pressed and sacrificial consumers.
And we are being nudged and nudged to accept this as being long-term.
Where is the BL&P’s social conscience? What is this corporate citizen going to do, apart from asking Barbadians oxymoronically to use less electricity?
The BL&P has thrown in the air on occasion complementary wind turbine power, but has not aggressively pursued alternative and cheaper means of energy production, as Senator Ince has admittedly suggested.
And why does the BL&P seemingly not think solar power a worthwhile investment?
Mr Stephen Worme, the BL&P’s marketing manager, must be better at stating his company’s case than Senator Ince. We look forward therefore to answers from Mr Worme – post-haste.
