One of the hot topics in Barbados, both in the press, online and offline, has to do with The Barbados Light & Power Company Limited. The BL&P Co. Ltd. is the sole provider of electricity in Barbados and a subsidiary of Emera, a Canadian electrical utility company.
Emera also has interests in St. Lucia (LUCELEC) and Grand Bahama (GBPC). The Canadian utility used to be involved in Dominica, but in March 2022, the Government of Dominica acquired the majority shares of DOMLEC.
Having tracked fuel prices, murder rates, fast food prices (KFC and Chefette), broadband affordability, and one or two other items over the last few years on this blog, it is time now for me to turn my attention to the BL&P Co., and in particular, to look specifically at electrical outages in Barbados.
First things first: Methodology. How did I come up with the data that will follow below? Simple (and tedious). I looked at every post on BL&P’s Facebook page between Jan 1 2023 and Sep 22 2023, and for every post that mentioned an outage, I logged it into an Excel spreadsheet (see screenshot below). I did the same thing when I looked at how the prices of Chefette Wing Dings changed over time, I went through Chefette’s FB page.
There are limitations with this approach. The primary limitation being that I can only count outages that were posted by the Utility company. As an outsider, I do not know what criteria must be satisfied before their staff make a post concerning an outage. For example, do a certain number of customers have to be without service, or is the outage estimated to last for a certain period of time, before a post is made on their FB page?
Based on what was posted by the BL&P Co. to their Facebook page, Barbados has experienced 40 outages from January 1 to September 22 2023. Two outages were island wide. Please check back this page periodically as I start to add all of the data over the last several months, and explain the charts.
NOTE: Detailed data is now current up to June 2023.
January 2023
There were a total of 4 outages during January 2023. The outages have been broken down below by the following: parish, day of the week and cause.
Note to Chart 4: The two pole related outages were caused by vehicles hitting them.
February 2023
There were a total of 3 outages during February 2023. The outages have been broken down below by the following: parish, day of the week and cause.
Note to Chart 7: The two pole related outages were caused by a damaged pole and a down pole.
March 2023
There were a total of 7 outages during March 2023. The outages have been broken down below by the following: parish, day of the week and cause.
Note to Chart 10: The two pole related outages were caused by fire, one of which was a grass fire.
April 2023
There were a total of 3 outages (including one island-wide outage) during April 2023. The outages have been broken down below by the following: parish, day of the week and cause.
Note to Chart 11: During the month of April there was one island-wide power outage. In addition to that, there were outages in St. George, St. Joseph and St. Peter.
Note to Chart 12: The island-wide outage occurred on Tuesday April 4th and lasted for 6.5 hours according to what was posted on the BL&P’s Facebook page (the date of the FB post was April 4) .
Note to Chart 13: The island-wide outage of April 4 was caused by a plant and equipment issue at the BL&P’s Spring Garden generation plant. The pole related outage (April 1) was caused by a grass fire.
May 2023
There were a total of 7 outages during May 2023. The outages have been broken down below by the following: parish, day of the week and cause.
Note to Chart 16: The two pole related incidents involved infrastructure on a pole (May 1) and a damaged pole (May 2). No details were provided for the two “No mention” outages (May 25 and May 31).
June 2023
There were a total of 5 outages during June 2023. The outages have been broken down below by the following: parish, day of the week and cause.
Note to Chart 19: Two of the outages (June 22 and 23) were caused by the passing of Troical Storm Bret.
caribbeansignal.com is the personal blog of Amit Uttamchandani. The information presented here does not represent the views, beliefs, opinions, et cetera, of His employers or associates (past or present). Amit also maintains the caribbeanweather.org website, and administers the Caribbean Weather Facebook group.