The Bahamas is facing a growing public crisis over persistent, widespread power disruptions across New Providence and multiple Family Islands, prompting Prime Minister Philip Davis to deliver a nationally televised address Wednesday night to address ongoing reliability failures at the country’s sole electricity provider, Bahamas Power and Light (BPL).
The announcement comes at the end of another weekend of rolling blackouts, capping a brutal summer that has seen BPL grapple with repeated service failures, soaring public anger, and internal labor unrest that has further strained grid operations.
No community has been hit harder than Grand Cay, where residents have endured near-constant power loss for nearly two weeks. A seven-day outage last week was only temporarily resolved when partial service was restored early Tuesday, only for the island to fall back into full blackout Thursday night. As of Tuesday, power had not been restored, forcing most households to rely on costly gasoline-powered generators to keep refrigerators, medical equipment and other essential devices running.
Local residents describe the crisis as the worst electrical failure they have ever experienced, with the added financial burden of constant generator use pushing household budgets to the breaking point. One resident told local outlet The Tribune that the average household spends around $40 per day on gasoline, with larger properties paying far more. Barry, a long-time Grand Cay resident who powers three properties — his own home, a rental unit, and his stepmother’s residence — told reporters he spends roughly $150 daily on fuel alone. He called the ongoing situation an absolute nightmare.
The outages are not just disrupting daily life: they are also derailing back-to-school preparations for local families and hurting the island’s critical tourism sector. Barry noted that he recently lost a tourist booking after the prospective visitors learned of the ongoing power problems. “We have so many tourists that love this place, but you can’t blame them because they want to be comfortable. The power situation has put us in a chokehold,” he said.
BPL has attributed Grand Cay’s prolonged outage to a catastrophic mechanical failure of the island’s primary existing generator. The company had planned to bring a replacement generator online to restore full service, but announced over the weekend that the replacement unit requires additional repairs and extensive safety testing before it can be deployed, leaving residents in limbo with no clear timeline for full restoration.
Grand Cay is far from the only affected community in Abaco. Nearby Guana Cay has also experienced extended outages, which BPL traced to two separate cable faults, including a damaged subsea cable that serves the southern end of the island. As of Tuesday, BPL announced that repairs to the subsea cable have been completed, but work on an underground cable fault in North Guana Cay remained ongoing. BPL also reported unplanned outages in Dundas Town Tuesday evening, with no official cause identified as of press time.
Widespread outages were also reported across multiple communities in New Providence over the past weekend. BPL noted that some outages were pre-planned to allow for critical system upgrades in areas including Cowpen Road, Faith Gardens, Golden Gates and Carmichael Road. Other unplanned disruptions were blamed on tripped feeders, pre-scheduled tree-trimming work, and proactive outages designed to prevent dangerous system overloads during peak summer demand.
The ongoing reliability crisis has unfolded against a backdrop of deep internal turmoil at BPL, sparked by a new overtime policy implemented by the Davis administration. The controversy began last week when The Tribune exclusively reported that three senior employees in BPL’s fuel and performance department collected a combined total of more than $600,000 in overtime pay between May 2025 and April 2026. The administration currently spends roughly $20 million per year on employee overtime for BPL, a figure senior officials have called “unacceptable” and financially unsustainable for the public utility.
In response to the excessive overtime payouts, the administration introduced new rules that cap scheduled overtime, require formal management review for employees who repeatedly hit the overtime cap, and mandate senior leadership approval for any worker whose overtime exceeds a set percentage of their base annual salary. The Bahamas Electrical Workers Union has opposed the new policy, arguing it violates the terms of its existing collective bargaining agreement with the company. The union has already filed a formal trade dispute over the change and has instructed all members to work strictly to rule, meaning employees only work their standard scheduled hours with no voluntary overtime until the dispute is resolved.