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Deputy Speaker,
Energy has always shaped the daily life of this nation.
People choose to sit in the summer heat rather than risk the costs associated with running their air conditioner all day. Businesses struggle to stay afloat as they pay high electricity bills. And, as we saw earlier this week, our power grid is still very susceptible to severe weather events.
Long before energy policy became the subject of debate in this Honourable House, it was discussed in every community across our archipelago.
As lights stayed off for hours during the hottest months of the year, anxiety built at the end of each month as households and businesses braced for their electricity bills.
This is our energy reality.
For far too long, the energy system in The Bahamas carried burdens that were managed rather than resolved.
We used band-aids, stopgaps, and temporary fixes when we should have been aiming higher: for permanent, transformational changes to the status quo.
The high bills and frequent outages we experienced for decades were the outward symptoms of deep structural weaknesses that worsened over many years.
As our population grew, as our economy diversified, and as climate pressures intensified, our generators and power grid struggled to keep pace.
Addressing those challenges required more than adjustments at the margins. It required a fundamental rethinking of how energy is planned, financed, generated, and delivered across this archipelago.
When my administration came into office, we soon realized that energy reform could not be deferred or approached incrementally. The scale of the challenge demanded a rapid and comprehensive response.
In 2021, as we began to assess the situation, it became clear that if we didn’t take action soon, we would eventually face a catastrophic power outage, the likes of which had never been seen before, and we would be hard-pressed to recover.
In New Providence, major generation assets were aging rapidly, with maintenance challenges and declining efficiency affecting reliability. Across the Family Islands, a significant portion of generation equipment was approaching or had exceeded its intended lifespan, placing entire communities at risk of prolonged outages. Some of the machinery was so old that the parts are no longer in production.
So, when they inevitably break, as all machines eventually do, we would be faced with an irreparable situation.
Meanwhile, our grid wasn’t faring any better.
Transmission and distribution infrastructure, much of it decades old, lacked the resilience required to withstand rising demand, higher ambient temperatures, and increasingly severe weather events.
Fuel costs were heavily exposed to global markets, leaving households and businesses vulnerable to sudden price spikes with few effective mechanisms in place to smooth volatility. Of course, the solution intended to address these fluctuations was poorly executed by the previous administration.
And I’ll talk more about that later.
Rental generation, intended as a temporary emergency measure, had become a routine feature of the system, diverting tens of millions of dollars each year toward short-term fixes instead of permanent solutions. These costs were ultimately borne by consumers and by the public purse.
Tens of millions to rent generators.
That’s like if your car breaks down and you rent a car so you can still have transportation.
That’s OK if you are maybe renting for a few days or a few weeks. But imagine driving that rental car for years and years.
Eventually, the cost of renting that vehicle will be so high that you could have bought multiple vehicles for the same amount.
That is the predicament our energy sector is in today.
Obviously, we have to put a stop to that.
The accumulated result of all these issues was an energy system that struggled to deliver reliably, even under normal operating conditions.
Bahamians experienced outages that disrupted daily life, damaged equipment, and undermined confidence in essential services.
Businesses faced uncertainty that constrained investment and growth.
These were not isolated failures, nor were they the product of any single decision.
They were the consequence of a system that had outgrown its original design and had not been restructured to meet modern demands.
Deputy Speaker,
I’m telling this story because any serious effort at reform requires honesty about the past.
For example, under the previous administration, a fuel hedging strategy was executed based on the use of heavy fuel oil.
In principle, hedging can be a responsible financial tool when it is aligned with operational capacity and infrastructure readiness.
We have no issue with hedging when done correctly.
It is essentially a way to lock in fuel prices to manage volatility, not to gamble on the market. Prices rise and fall, but hedging helps smooth those swings and provide more predictable costs over time.
It is a viable solution when done correctly.
But the FNM did not do it correctly.
At the time, some of the Wartsila engines that were supposed to utilize heavy fuel oil were offline.
Those were the engines that were going to use the heavy fuel oil. If you can’t use the fuel, then the savings you would have gotten from using that fuel, you don’t get anymore.
Furthermore, these engines were not tri-fuel as promised, further limiting their capacity.
As a result, even when market conditions moved favourably, Bahamians saw limited benefit because the system was incapable of converting those favourable prices into lower costs.
The hedge existed on paper, but the engines required to realize its value were not in service.
That experience underscored a critical lesson for this administration.
Financial instruments cannot compensate for broken or unavailable infrastructure. Savings projected in spreadsheets do not necessarily translate into relief for households unless the system itself is capable of performing.
Any credible reform has to begin with restoring operational capacity before layering on sophisticated financial strategies.
If you don’t do it this way, you end up like the FNM: bragging about savings that only exist in promises and plans, but never materialize in electricity bills.
This country needed more than just a hedge. We needed a New Energy Era of transformative change.
This administration acted on the lessons of the past.
Today, six of the seven Wartsila engines are online, with one undergoing scheduled servicing, restoring the system’s ability to support modern fuel.
Now, our operational readiness matches our financial design, creating the conditions necessary for reforms to deliver real benefits to consumers.
Deputy Speaker,
Confronted with these realities, we made a deliberate decision to move away from short-term fixes and toward comprehensive structural reform. Managing decline through rentals and emergency interventions was not a viable strategy for a growing economy. Passing unresolved risk forward to future administrations and future generations was neither responsible nor acceptable.
Instead, we committed to rebuilding the energy sector on a foundation of modern governance, clear policy direction, and disciplined execution.
That commitment is reflected in the passage of a new Electricity Act, the introduction of a Natural Gas Act, and the development of the first comprehensive National Energy Policy to guide the sector in this country.
These measures were not adopted in isolation. They were sequenced deliberately, beginning with law and policy, followed by carefully structured investments.
This approach ensures that every project proceeds within a stable regulatory framework, with defined responsibilities, transparency, and accountability.
Energy reform of this scale cannot succeed without coherence across government, which is why this effort has been driven from the centre of my administration, with sustained Cabinet oversight, leadership by the Ministry, and active engagement with regulators and stakeholders.
This New Energy Era is not defined by a single project or a single fuel choice. It is an integrated strategy designed to strengthen the entire energy value chain while reducing vulnerability to external shocks.
Liquefied natural gas is being introduced as a stabilizing fuel to reduce exposure to oil price volatility and improve cost predictability.
It is not a replacement for renewable energy, but a partner fuel that allows the system to transition responsibly while maintaining reliability.
Utility-scale solar is being deployed to harness our natural advantages, lower long-term generation costs, and reduce dependence on imported fuels.
Battery storage and modern grid management technologies are also being integrated to support these changes.
Across New Providence and the Family Islands, solar and hybrid microgrids are being developed with Bahamian partners to improve reliability, reduce diesel dependence, and enhance resilience in communities that have historically borne the brunt of outages.
At the same time, rental generation is being phased out, with full elimination targeted by fiscal year 2028. In two years, Deputy Speaker, we will say goodbye to the rentals and replace them with permanent solutions, saving tens of millions of dollars each year.
Each component of this strategy reinforces the others, creating a system that is more reliable, more affordable, and better equipped to meet the demands of a changing climate and economy.
Deputy Speaker,
Structural reform requires disciplined governance.
Strengthening oversight at BPL, improving collections, enhancing operational controls, and aligning incentives with performance are essential to ensuring that the benefits of reform are sustained over time.
This administration has focused not only on new infrastructure, but on the systems and institutions responsible for managing it.
Consumer protection also remains a central priority.
Regulatory mechanisms such as the Equity Rate Adjustment have been used to deliver targeted relief to those most in need.
In 2025, this adjustment provided approximately eleven million dollars in savings to consumers, with roughly twenty percent of residential customers paying no base rate during that year.
This was the result of deliberate policy choices aimed at balancing financial sustainability with providing relief for Bahamian households.
Deputy Speaker,
As LNG is integrated into our fuel mix, we are projecting approximately one hundred and ninety megawatts of natural gas generation capacity by late 2027. At the same time, twenty-three microgrid and solar projects are being developed across the Family Islands, delivering close to two hundred megawatts of new generation capacity by 2027, including ninety-seven megawatts of solar power paired with battery storage.
In New Providence, foundational grid upgrades delivered a forty-five percent reduction in outage frequency and a thirty-five percent reduction in outage duration in 2025 compared to historic averages, with smart grid devices preventing tens of thousands of customer interruptions. These are not projections. They are recorded outcomes that demonstrate what disciplined investment and system reform can achieve.
From a financial standpoint, the transformation underway is restorative.
A fuel hedging strategy executed in December 2025 now provides three hundred and sixty-five days of protection against fuel price volatility, covering approximately two and a half million barrels of fuel oil as the transition to LNG and new generation assets proceeds.
This is what it looks like when you execute a hedge correctly and fix the foundational issues before you implement it.
Five-year forecasts put Bahamas Power and Light on track to eliminate its debt within six years and close the long-standing current account imbalance between the Government and the utility.
International institutions have taken note of the transformation, with independent studies projecting that energy sector reform could lift long-term economic growth while reducing fossil fuel imports and external vulnerabilities
Deputy Speaker,
Fuel hedging strategies are now aligned with operational capacity, providing protection against price volatility while new generation assets come online.
Grid upgrades are underway to reduce losses and improve reliability.
And other big changes, including a big change in ownership of the Grand Bahama Power Company, are underway.
This ensures that the savings can be passed on to all Bahamians.
That brings us to the resolutions before us.
These resolutions play a role in moving our transformation forward. Now that we have a solid plan in place, we must finalize the financial arrangements.
With these resolutions, we are securing funding without authorizing new spending.
Instead, the resolutions before us provide limited, transaction-specific guarantees required to support fuel procurement and infrastructure development within a framework of parliamentary oversight.
These guarantees are capped and clearly defined. They are brought forward precisely because this Government believes that transparency and accountability strengthen public trust and protect our national interests. They ensure that essential energy arrangements can function reliably, while preserving the role of this House in scrutinizing commitments that carry contingent risk.
In practical terms, they seek the approval of this House for the Government to provide limited guarantees so that a commercial bank, Banco Santander, S.A., can issue a revolving line of credit and performance letters of credit on behalf of Bahamas LNG Partner Ltd., a special-purpose vehicle wholly owned by the Government.
This funding is a part of the over one billion dollars in funding moving our New Energy Era forward.
When this transformation is complete, Bahamians will live in a country where outages will be the exception rather than the rule, electricity costs will be more predictable and more affordable, businesses will be able to plan and invest with confidence, and families will be able to budget without fear of sudden shocks.
Deputy Speaker,
Energy reform is foundational work. It is complex, expensive, demanding, and often invisible when done well, but it determines the success of everything that follows.
This New Energy Era is really about resilience and opportunity.
I wish to thank our Ministry of Energy, her team, the board of BPL, the Energy Committee that has met, at my office every Monday at 8 am since we took office in 2021, to ensure that we get this right.
It is about doing the hard work now so that future generations inherit a stronger, more secure Bahamas.
That is the vision guiding this Administration.
That is the work before this House.
And that is why the resolutions before us have my complete unbridled support.
Thank you, Deputy Speaker.