Prime Minister Philip Davis’s Remarks at the Energy Reform Stakeholder Forum

Friends, good morning.

Thank you for being here. I know you are busy people with families, businesses, and communities depending on you. 

When you make time for a conversation like this, it is because you understand how much reliable and affordable electricity matters to daily life in our islands.

For many years, Bahamians have been saying the same thing: fix the power problem. 

Fix the blackouts. 

Fix the high bills. 

Fix the confusion around BPL. 

That plea has come from every corner of our country, from households watching the meter, from small shops trying to stay open, from hotels, clinics, schools, and farms.

When we came to office, it was clear that patchwork repairs were no longer enough. 

The electricity system was held together by short-term fixes. 

We had to step back, look honestly at the whole picture, and accept that nothing less than a New Energy Era was required.

Let me remind the country of what we found.

BPL was carrying around five hundred million dollars in debt. 

Each year, more than fifty million dollars was spent simply to subsidise electricity in the Family Islands. 

In many of those islands, the true cost of producing a single kilowatt hour was not the twenty or thirty cents people see on their bills, but in some cases between the high thirties and the nineties once fuel transport, labour, and the inefficiency of tiny systems were counted.

At the same time, BPL was renting around thirty two megawatts of generation at roughly forty million dollars a year.

Over eighty per cent of the existing engines were expected to reach the end of their working lives within five years. 

Immediate replacement needs were more than eighty million dollars before we added a single panel of solar or a single battery. 

Millions more were being spent each year on sludge handling, environmental cleanup, and emergency repairs.

Layered on top of those numbers was the legacy of past decisions. 

A one hundred and twenty million dollar voluntary separation exercise that drained away the institutional knowledge BPL depends on. 

A Rate Reduction Bond process that failed, leaving BPL with land it still owes money on and banks still owed fees, yet no bond in place.

The Clifton Pier Power Station A project that was sold to the public as a tri-fuel solution, but in practice delivered dual fuel generation and a building that can properly support only five engines, but seven were installed, with no solar integration and a fragile transmission and distribution system in New Providence, the economic heart of the country. 

Then, roughly one hundred million dollars of extra fuel under recovery debt was added to the burden.

We also faced a pension liability of a little over a hundred million.

That is the house we inherited. 

Our task has been to keep the lights on while we repair its foundations.

The New Energy Era is our answer to that task.

It is the largest restructuring of the electricity system since the country was first electrified. 

It is ambitious, complex and long-term, and it is designed with a very simple aim in mind: to give Bahamians a power system that works.

The first element is clear: we have to move from rented engines to permanent modern generation. 

For years, the country paid tens of millions of dollars to use equipment that did not belong to us. Those rentals were a sign of a system stuck in crisis. 

The new agreements bring in efficient, modern plant so that the money Bahamians pay each month builds assets that sit on our balance sheet, in our country, serving our people.

The second element is fuel. 

Fuel has always been the biggest driver of your light bill. Any plan that pretends otherwise is not honest. 

Under the reforms, we are introducing LNG into the mix and pairing it with a serious hedging programme. 

A large portion of what used to be pure fuel cost is now replaced by a fixed power purchase price. The remaining exposure to fuel prices is then managed at lower and more stable levels.

This structure underpins the projected ninety seven million dollars in savings for consumers in the fuel part of the bill, once the programme is fully rolled out.

The third element is clean power. Across the islands, we are adding utility-scale solar and battery storage to hybrid microgrids. 

Every unit of energy produced by the sun replaces imported diesel and heavy fuel oil.

That means less vulnerability to global oil shocks, fewer emissions, and systems that can restart and recover more quickly after a storm.

The fourth element is the network itself. 

We have created Bahamas Grid Company as a transmission and distribution company, with BPL holding a forty per cent share. The transmission and distribution tariff includes money that is set aside every year for a hurricane restoration fund and for paying down BPL’s old debt. 

When storms hit, and poles and lines are damaged, this is the mechanism that allows us to respond faster and more systematically.

When the grid company earns a profit, a share of that profit flows back to BPL and therefore to the Bahamian people.

The fifth element is how we judge value. Every new Power Purchase Agreement has been tested against the true cost of generation in each island. 

In some Family Islands, that true cost exceeds forty eight cents and in some cases approaches ninety four cents per kilowatt hour. 

Those are the hidden figures that have driven subsidies for years. 

The new contracts are designed to replace high true costs with lower long-term prices, easing pressure on the system as a whole and putting us on a path to reduce the Family Island subsidy burden by around half over time.

All of this has one purpose: to change the direction of the electricity system from permanent crisis to steady progress.

But I want to speak about something else that is just as important as the engineering and the finance – and that is transparency.

In the past, large energy projects were often announced with fanfare, while the contracts sat in drawers. 

People were asked to trust what they could not see. We know where that approach led. 

It bred mistrust. 

It left the country asking, “What exactly did we sign? Who benefits? How does this affect my bill?”

We chose another way.

We have already released more than three thousand pages of energy agreements and supporting documents. Power Purchase Agreements. 

Technical appendices. Term sheets. Tariff models. Regulatory approvals. 

They are part of the public record. They are there for parliamentarians, journalists, civil society, and citizens to examine.

We did this because energy policy is too important to be hidden. It affects every home, every business, every clinic, every school.

People have a right to see what has been done in their name.

This forum today builds on that release. 

It is not simply a presentation. It is an invitation to scrutiny. 

Our officials from the Ministry of Energy and Transport, from BPL, and from the project partners are here to walk through the structure of the reforms, to explain how the bills are calculated, how the contracts fit together, and how the path from where we are now to where we aim to be has been mapped.

There will be questions. Some of them will be difficult. 

That is healthy. 

We welcome questions that come with a willingness to engage honestly with the facts.

I have invited the Leader of the Opposition and his colleagues to take part as well. 

If they believe the conclusions they have shared with the public, there is no better place to test those claims than here, in front of the country, with the experts in the room and the documents on the table. 

This is an opportunity not just to challenge the government, but to answer questions about their own ideas for fixing the system. 

The Bahamian people deserve to see that exchange.

I also want to lift our eyes beyond the spreadsheets and the technical terms and talk about the bigger picture.

A modern energy system is our ability to grow and compete. 

Manufacturers will not invest where power is unreliable. 

Hotels cannot deliver world-class service when they live in fear of outages. 

Digital businesses cannot thrive without constant, stable electricity.

If we get this right, we give our young people a country where blackouts do not decide their future. 

We give our schools and clinics the basic platform they need. 

We give our investors and employers the confidence to commit to long-term plans. 

We make our islands less exposed to fuel price shocks and weather events, and we hold our place in the world as a responsible part of the global response to climate change.

This is why I say that the New Energy Era is historic. 

It is not perfect. No plan is. 

It will need adjustments as technology changes and as we learn from experience. 

But for the first time, we are tackling the full structure of the system: generation, fuel, transmission and distribution, debt, and subsidies, and we are doing so with a clear line of sight to the future.

We are also creating new fields of opportunity for Bahamians. 

The shift to gas, solar, storage, microgrids and smart networks brings with it new skills, new trades and new professions. 

Our technicians, engineers and entrepreneurs will have the chance to work at the cutting edge of energy technology, not just repair ageing engines. 

Part of our task is to match our training programmes and scholarships to these opportunities, so that Bahamians are not just consumers of new technology, but owners and leaders in it.

There will be critics who say we are moving too slowly, and others who say we are moving too fast. 

That comes with the territory. 

The test is not whether everyone agrees at every stage. 

The test is whether, in five years, ten years, twenty years, our people can look back and say: that was the moment the country stopped drifting and started to build a power system that worked.

We have already come some distance. 

The reforms are underway. The documents are public. The investments are being made. 

The old habits of secrecy and short-term thinking are being challenged. 

There is still a long road ahead, and we will not always get every detail right on the first attempt. 

But we are moving with purpose, and we are being honest about the choices and the trade-offs.

So I ask you today to engage fully. 

Listen to the presentations. Ask your questions. Test the assumptions. 

Then help us carry the facts back to your communities, your workplaces, your unions, your churches, your professional bodies.

The promise I make as Prime Minister is straightforward. 

We will continue to meet you in forums like this. 

We will continue to make the contracts and the data public. 

We will continue to adjust where adjustment is needed. 

We will keep our eyes on the larger goal: a Bahamas where the lights stay on, the bills make sense, and the energy system supports the hopes of our people rather than holding them back.

If we keep that goal in view, if we do the work carefully and openly, then years from now Bahamians will be able to say, “That was the period when we finally got energy policy right.”

Thank you.