The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

Bahamas Power & Light (BPL) is “five to seven years away” from hitting global utility standards, but its chief executive yesterday said improvement “has zero to do with money.”

Whitney Heastie, pictured, told Tribune Business that rigorous management, rather than extra dollars, was key to transforming a dysfunctional corporate culture where “oil was all over the place” and minimal equipment maintenance occurring.

He described BPL as “a mirror image” of what he found upon being appointed Grand Bahama Power Company’s (GBPC) vice-president of generation in 2010, where little to no focus was also being placed on safety and the environment.

Mr Heastie said failings in these areas inevitably translated into operational woes and, following his appointment as BPL chief executive in October 2017, he is now seeking out “change agents” to overhaul the utility’s management at minimal cost to energy consumers.

He pointed to Abaco as an example of what he is trying to achieve, arguing that little to nothing had been heard from an island plagued by blackouts and outages for years since he appointed a former GB Power colleague to head-up BPL’s operation there from April 2018.

Mr Heastie told Tribune Business that BPL must perform much better in identifying the “root cause” of outages, revealing that it was spending significant sums on repairs without knowing whether it is “getting any benefit for it” and solving the problem.

He added that the state-owned utility’s transmission and distribution (T&D) network was also failing to support its generation infrastructure, suggesting that the Harbour Island power plant would not be necessary if there was adequate connectivity to the mainland Hatchet Bay plant.

“This has zero to do with money; this has to do with good management,” Mr Heastie said of his transformation plan. “When I came in as a Board member at BPL it was very clear to me this was almost a mirror image of GB Power [when I started], where safety and the environment were not where they ought to be.

“It speaks volumes to the extent that unless people focus on safety and the environment, operations are going to follow suit. That’s a by-product of the culture around safety and the environment.

“When you look at Clifton Pier [power station], Clifton Pier really exemplifies to me the culture of the whole entity. You go into Bimini, Abaco, anywhere in the Bahamas; it’s really a replica of what I saw in New Providence.”

A career engineer of almost 40 years, who has worked in the US and for other Grand Bahama-based industrial players, Mr Heastie said his experience with GB Power had left him well-prepared to effect similar change at BPL - albeit on a much larger scale.

“With due diligence we can start to change this,” he told Tribune Business, “but we have to start with safety and the environment. We can’t continue to abuse safety practices and environmental systems, and not pay attention to them and think we will be successful.

“Oil was all over the place, there was zero or little care for pieces of equipment leaking oil. Often we want to blame the equipment at Clifton Pier down there for the environmental state down there, but you have to blame the management of the equipment at Clifton Pier.

“What we have in the company is a mindset that has to shift from operations to safety and the environment. Once we get safety and the environment right, the assets will be fine because people will be in tune with taking care of the assets, don’t do it in an unsafe manner, and be environmentally friendly.”

Mr Heastie said he was also determined to change an approach where BPL was satisfied simply with restoring power following an outage, rather than determining its true cause - a practice that was leading to the wastage of consumer dollars and undermining the utility’s service reliability.

He revealed that while BPL was employing standard industry indices to measure the frequency, and length, of outages it was “not using them to determine hit spots” that typically caused network failures.

“Our posture is simply to put the power back on,” the BPL chief executive told Tribune Business. “We never stop to say: This should not happen, what are the root causes? We have to understand why power goes out in some areas and not others.”

Mr Heastie said BPL needs to become much more scientific in its “root cause analysis” to ensure it was getting value for money from upgrades, and repairs, to its generation and transmission and distribution systems.

“That’s where we need to be applying time and effort to make sure we understand, because unless we do that we are spending taxpayer dollars and not getting any benefit for it,” he added. “These indices should be getting better.

“This type of thing I’m trying to get rooted and grounded so we spend money for a purpose. We know we’re spending money. The difficulty we have is when asked: ‘What did you resolve?’ it’s very difficult to say we’ve eliminated this cause by spending this money. We’ve got to get to the root cause of what’s causing these outages and eliminate them.”

Mr Heastie said the multi-million dollar internal fraud that BPL’s Board had to deal with upon taking office showed that the utility’s “policies, procedures and controls” also needed attention – not just for financial management, but in areas such as Clifton Pier and grid instability.

“When you look inside BPL, and look at the safety, the environment, the operational, the financial, the assets; you look down the whole gamut, it says we really need to move to good power utility standards,” he told Tribune Business.

“We’ve got to work aggressively to get there. We’re still five to seven years away from there. This is going to be a journey.”

The BPL chief executive said Abaco was a potential model for his transformation plan, where he had named a former GB Power co-worker, Donald Maclellan, to head-up the utility’s operations there following a much-publicised series of outages on the island.

“Abaco has been a problem for decades,” Mr Heastie said. “Today, how much do you hear about Abaco? Simply because I took someone who worked with me at GB Power, and who’s very much in tune with safety and the environment, and put him in charge.

“He has gone to Abaco from April this year, and people there will say: ‘What a transformation this has been in a short space of time’. Its cost us less money with the same people but different management. The reliability has gone up, but if you ask how much money has been spent, not a dollar more.

“I’ve said to the Board: Abaco is going to be our test bed. It demonstrates that with the right management and strategy in place, people are willing but they need leadership. We need change agents. The size of what you’re dealing with is so large it’s impossible to do it yourself.”