Does EMERA care about Barbadian consumers and is the FTC inept?
I have formally submitted my opposition to the Fair Trading Commission (FTC) giving the Barbados Light and Power Company Limited (BL&P) the exemption that the utility requested in its August 2024 Application to be exempted from Standards of Service and payment of fines and compensation to ratepayers affected by service outages. My objections are contained in a 30-page document detailing the reasons why granting the exemption would not only be imprudent and biased, but also unlawful. I also make detailed recommendations on how the FTC should deal with the BLPC’s application to not compensate consumers.
Over 5 months ago, the BL&P applied to the FTC asking to be exempted from complying with its lawful Standards of Service obligations; service standards that it had already breached. In effect the BL&P is applying to the FTC to avoid paying compensation to ratepayers who experienced prolonged power outages after the passage of Hurricane Beryl on July 1st last year. The BL&P is also seeking to avoid paying the penalties that the FTC can impose on it when the service standards are breached.
The FTC kept this most recent application concealed from BL&P’s customers and Barbadians generally for nearly 5 months before making the application public and inviting comment. Delaying the notice and setting ridiculously short minimum response time are entirely the FTC’s doing. Whatever the FTC’s reason for delaying, the delay will have had the effect of not drawing attention to the protections offered to ratepayers by the Standards of Service. That inaction on the FTC’s part only benefits the Light and Power.
Relatively few Barbadians have ever read the Standards of Service that apply to the Barbados Light and Power. There is a passing reference to them in fine print on the back on ratepayers’ monthly bills, which states
“Customers can apply for service connections, submit a query, access their account or find out about our Standards of Service online at http://www.blpc.copm.bb.”
Fewer Barbadians still are aware of their right to be compensated when the Light and Power does not meet these mandatory standards, especially as they relate to power quality or power outages.
Of the very limited number of ratepayers who are aware that there are guaranteed standards that, if breached, could result in compensation, few are aware that the ratepayer has to formally apply to be compensated, even though the BL&P, with its new smart meters, knows the exact duration of an account holder’s power outage, down nearly to the minute. (Barbadians already know that the Light and Power’s meter readers no longer come to our houses to read any meter.) Almost no-one knows that the form used to apply for compensation must, according to the Light and Power, be completed and returned to its “customer service office at Garrison Hill, St Michael within three (3) months of the date of the event giving rise to the claim.”
Had the FTC made the Application for exemption public in a timely manner, tens of thousands of ratepayers who experienced power outages during and after the passage of Hurricane Beryl would have been alerted and may have submitted claims for compensation.
Although the Light and Power has not made public, in its application or otherwise, the level of compensation it is seeking to avoid paying to ratepayers, my team has calculated that, conservatively, it could have been facing claims amounting to $2Million. In suppressing the Light and Power’s application long enough until ratepayers’ window to apply for compensation had closed, the FTC has saved the Light and Power a significant amount of money, whether or not it grants the exemption, not including any penalties that may have applied. We can expect that the Light and Power will say that making them pay after the claim period has expired would be unfair and damaging to their business.
Barbadians recall the total island wide blackouts of November 2019. Those 2 blackouts on successive days, were absolute, island wide and for a duration of more than the 10 hours that was stipulated in the standards of services in force at the time as a prerequisite for triggering compensation. They also occurred on Monday and Tuesday, widely regarded as the two most productive days of the week and had maximum impact on businesses.
Based on the compensation specified in the then Standards of Service, the Light and Power should have paid out over $7.2M for each of the days, the 18th and the 19th, for a total of $14.4M. We have enquired. We have also reviewed the Light and Power’s financial statements for 2019, 2020 and 2021 in an attempt to determine where this compensation was paid. Barbadians may recall an August 19, 2020 headline in the local media, nine months after the blackouts that read: “Fair Trading Commission yet to determine compensation over 2019 blackout”.
Even though there was only Light and Power itself to blame, with no Hurricane Beryl to hide behind in order to request a Force Majeure exemption, nine months after the blackouts, FTC had not ordered the compensation to be paid. $14Million in compensation due to Barbadian ratepayers came to nothing. .
In 2025, the FTC is, once again, engaging in activities that appear to support the Barbados Light and Power and its parent company Emera Inc., to the detriment of ratepaying Barbadians.
This development will not come as a surprise to Barbadians, whom I have urged to be vigilant, and to pay close attention to what has been happening in our energy sector for the past few years.
The FTC has already indicated that it will decide this exemption application by a written hearing. Since the FTC (unlawfully) does not publish the submissions of members of the public in these written hearings, nor the information filed by the utility in response to interrogatories, the written hearing process amounts to a secret review of the applicationr, hidden from the people who have to pay the actual rates or in this case, whom the BL&P want to avoid compensating.
Since the 2021 Rate Review Application, which was heard in the full view of the public, and in which the weakness of the Light and Power’s case was exposed by intervenors for all to see, resulting in the FTC not being able to grant the Light and Power’s request, the FTC has determined every subsequent request or application by way of written hearing, regardless of the money at stake, sometimes running into hundreds of millions of dollars. Every action that the FTC now takes on applications from the Light and Power, is concealed from the vigilant eyes of the people who have to pay the rates, concealed from ordinary Barbadians. This works only in the interest of the Barbados Light and Power.
The government’s increasingly unfair, anti-consumer, anti-citizen approach to regulating the BL&P and the electricity sector generally is being taken to new heights, or rather a new low, by this application for exemption from service standards, at a time when the BL&P has applied to the FTC for and has been granted 3 successive rate increases in 3 years.
Barbadian rate payers continue to be burdened by high rates that continue to increase as the FTC grants rate increases request by the Light and Power. Barbadians are still paying the unlawful interim rate increase granted by the FTC some 23 months ago, in September 2022. That increase is still in effect in spite of the same FTC ruling in 2023, twice, that the Light and Power did not justify and prove that the rate increase that it requested was fair and reasonable.
In the past weeks Barbadians have complained to me that their light bills went up in December because of an increased Fuel Clause Adjustment…while the price of oil globally declined; declined to the extent that gas prices at the pump, in Barbados, went down.
In the months leading up to the reduction of gas prices at the pump, global oil prices decreased some 8.2%. In the same period the Light and Power’s Fuel Clause adjustment increased 5.3%.
The reason is two-fold. 1) The Light and Power is operating inefficiently with respect to least cost dispatch priority, i.e. use the lowest cost generation assets first. And this is because its lower cost generators are often out of service for maintenance reasons. 2) The FTC has allowed the Light and Power to hide expensive generation cost within the Fuel Clause Adjustment and much of that cost is not even fuel. It is just hidden in with the fuel.
At present the true cost of fuel to ratepayers is approximately 34¢ per kWh. If the Light and Power was utilising its generators efficiently, that cost would decrease to under 30¢ per kWh given today’s oil prices. However, ratepayers currently pay for battery storage through the FCA, they pay for renewable energy through the FCA at prices upwards of 43¢ per kWh. Rate payers are also now paying rental fees for generation units that utilise the most expensive fuel available. And again ratepayers are paying, through the FCA, at a staggering cost of $1.43 per kWh. for these rentals.
I urge Barbadians to continue to be vigilant and demand a public disclosure and response from the FTC to interventions made by the public and by intervenors in this request by the Light and Power to NOT pay compensation. Barbadians have to remain vigilant and more importantly tell the FTC, and those that appoint them to do their job, that we are watching them, whether they like it or not.
-THE END-
Tricia Watson is a former Senator, and legal and regulatory expert that has advised Barbados government on electricity and telecommunications licensing and regulation. She an ardent and active energy justice activist, and is currently intervening as a citizen advocate in the Barbados Light and Power Company Limited’s various requests for electricity price increases, on behalf of Barbados’ consumers of electricity. She is committed to keeping Barbadians informed about the on-going rate cases, and about electricity regulation and management issues that affect all users of electricity in Barbados and that affect consumers generally.
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