Two weeks ago, two gentlemen from the Bahamas came to Halifax, looking for answers from Emera. Troy Garvey and Jonathan Glinton represent Operation Justice Bahamas, and they have their sights set on taking the home-grown power monster to court back on the island. Set sail for corporate misadventures as we embark upon…The Emera Connection.
One of Emera’s most recent procurements is the Grand Bahamas Power Company, of which they maintain an 80% ownership, as of December 2010. The regulatory situation in Grand Bahama is unique, and lends itself well to corporate pirates that make Captain Morgan look more like Captain Kangaroo. However, to fully understand the sneaky details behind Emera’s current plum deal, we’ll need to take a step back in history.
In 1955, Virginian lumber man Wallace Groves, an original Wall Street bankster from the ’20s, signed an agreement with the Government of Bahamas, known as the Hawksbill Creek Agreement (HCA). Originally intended to allow Groves access to timber on the north end of the island of Grand Bahama, HCA turned a 200km stretch of pristine Caribbean real estate into a “free-trade zone”. Groves logged, but he also built an industrial, free-trade, empire, established Freeport, the second-largest in the Bahamas, and created The Grand Bahamas Port Authority (GBPA).
Groves passed away in 1988, but the veritable kingdom he established in Grand Bahama lives on to this day through the GBPA. The GBPA continues to hold licencing responsibilities for industrial and commercial enterprises. It develops all manner of infrastructure, and runs the airport, the casinos, and tourist development projects. With a finger in every pie, the Port Authority is the corporation that governs outright; a frightening beast indeed. In the early 1990s, they sold interests in Grand Bahamas Power Company, which Emera acquired a controlling interest in, in 2010.
The nuts and bolts of the Grand Bahamas Power Company is that it has a generating capacity of 137.5 MW, and serves approximately 20,000 customers. The vast majority of the Power Company’s generators run on low-grade oil, known as “bunker C”. For comparison’s sake, the Lingan Power Plant in Cape Breton, Emera’s “Old Nelly”, has a generating capacity of 600 MW.
The Power Company outfit isn’t new, and brownouts and power outages on Grand Bahama weren’t unknown before Emera went south. But according to Obie Wilchcombe, MP for West End and Bimini, power outages on Grand Bahama have never been this constant or lengthy.
Outages aside, the real zinger being thrown at Emera by Operation Justice Bahamas is related to the meteoric, and seemingly unaccountable, rise in power bills. Garvey, Glinton, and the pro-bono lawyer taking the case before Bahamian parliament, Osman Johnson, claim that bills have begun to rival mortgages. Dozens, if not hundreds, are now doing without power on Grand Bahama.
