8,000 Customers Temporarily Lose Power
[Updated] There are unofficial reports of a power outage today [Aug 12] with reports indicating that homes scattered across various parishes island-wide have been affected. We are awaiting clarification from BELCO on the matter, and will update as able.
Update 2.22pm: A BELCO spokesperson said: “At 2:00 pm, Sunday, 12 August, approximately 4,000 customers across the Island remain without electricity, after two load sheds were triggered at BELCO’s Central Plant. Every effort is being made to restore electricity to these customers as quickly as possible.
“Load was first shed this morning at approximately 9:30 am when one engine shut down. Power was restored to all of the 3,000 affected customers by approximately 11:00 am.
“Subsequently, another major engine tripped just after noon, leaving about 8,000 customers without power. About half had of these customers had power restored by approximately 1:30 pm.
“Today’s engine failures were due to unrelated mechanical problems. In addition, today urgent repairs were being carried out on other engines, which meant that generating capacity was lower than normal. In addition, load on BELCO’s system has been high for a Sunday, with demand at about 105 megawatts.
“BELCO is asking the community to conserve energy over the next 24 hours, as work continues to restore generating capacity in the Central Plant.
“BELCO thanks customers for taking steps to conserve, and apologizes to those customers who have been without power today.”
Update 3.09pm: “Power has been restored to the remaining 4,000 customers,” a spokesperson said. “Again, BELCO is asking for conservation for the next 24 hours, and we thank customers for their patience.”
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Outage from 930 to 1020 and again at around noon, ongoing. So much for getting things done around the house.
Please consider the people punished, could government give them what they want please?
If you pay attention..government giving them what they want results in a very high increase to all belco customers! I don’t know about you but i’m sure their are many with me who do not want an increase. thanks
What happened to soooooo many ppl up and left Bermy??? Shouldn’t there be less consumption??? Something is not right. It is hot. I already conserve. I have less ppl living in my house, down 50% but my bill doesn’t show it. Like I said, something just doesn’t add up to being right with BELCO!!!???!!!
More huge signs of a failing economy and the roll back to days of yore! Lack of investment in infrastructure ,the money is gone every where like the expats so they gotta shaft those that remain.
As one of the people that helped to restore the power to all you whiny creature comfort babies, I want to say stop the whining. Get out and enjoy your house and enjoy your beautiful island. Get out and visit friends and family and stop calling to say the powers out WE KNOW IT IS.
Wow…a BELCO worker tells Bermuda to “stop the whining!”? That just says it all about BELCO’s customer service.
And P.S. if you know the power is out, bloody well FIX IT ALREADY!
We are fixing it and once again the whining public strikes again with silly comments.
Gosh, if you’re working so hard, I wonder how you have time to post comments on Bernews?
Shut Your Pie Hole…How about working with Digicel/CellOne and putting a simple text notification system in place. That way customers would receive a text informing them of an outage and you could then en mass provide them with repair updates. Not rocket science and this would save you fielding 8000 calls from customers who don’t know whether its just themselves who are without power or a mass outage.
What a wonderful example of customer service you are, Mr Shut Your Pie Hole. It makes you wonder why everyone thinks Bermudian workers are lazy and rude, doesn’t it.
Wow, who do you think you are…. belco worker….. Belco you should be concerned with your customer service….. but you don’t care… what gall!
Belco gets paid very well through its ridiculous rates to provide a service. All customers have a right to complain when that service is not available, so stop your moaning that your customers were not pleased with your poor performance and get back to work, and try to improve it, rather than complaining because you actually had to work for a change, rather than spending all day chatting with your buddies. Great customer service representation for Belco…. what an asshol*
Because of your incompetence and your poor attitude toward paying customers we have to leave our homes and enjoy the out doors. As long as I am a paying customer I have the right to whine. I think you should put your brain in gear before you make silly statements…
Well lets see, how many outages have there been in the last two months?
If consumption is down so much why are there so many problems? All that monitoring equipment you guys have, things like this should be seen and corrected before they become a problem (like transformers exploding…)
Whiny? Do you know how frigging hot it is? It’s not ‘whining’ or being a ‘creature comfort baby.’ What about households with the elderly or small babies? This happens more and more-if I didn’t know better I’d say Belco is doing this deliberately to justify needing additional funds for improvements. They know we’re at their mercy…I feel it’s a ‘we’ll show them’ mentality.
There’s nothing wrong with expecting to have power that doesn’t shut down every two minutes. We pay a lot of money to Belco-we expect that we get what we pay for. Who are you to say we need to ‘get out of the house’? First of all, there are many reasons people can’t. Secondly, how the heck is someone going to get oneself looking decent enough to get out the house when there’s no flipping power???
You really have a nerve. You just do your job properly so that the PAYING public doesn’t have to deal with this crap.
BTW-I didn’t call Belco…I called friends and once I knew that it wasn’t just me, I knew that Belco would be on it so not everyone called. Also, I could put up with it for awhile but as time went on it got really uncomfortable and was tempted to call but didn’t. I’m sure many others tried to stick it out as well but after it went on for so long, they probably got impatient and called…again-IT’s SUMMER-IT’S HOT!!!
I so agree with you. I’ve been saying this since the first outage, that this is a ploy for them to show they need the funds for new equipment.
“Today’s engine failures were due to unrelated mechanical problems”
How can repeated “unrelated mechanical problems” be in fact … unrelated? As an essential service BELCO needs to be held accountable and disclose fully and immediately the scope and cause(s) of these recurring delivery failures.
By their own statistics the number of customers (i.e. households) have decreased significantly over the last few years (thank you PLP) so it’s not because there isn’t sufficient generating capacity.
Meanwhile customers have been forced to pay more and more for the same service year over year and yet diesel prices have remained relatively flat. This begs the question, why are customers being forced to pay for the maintenance of shareholder dividends? When will the Government step in and say enough is enough and ensure the taxpayers needs are properly considered?
Is there a reason or connection between the Government’s blind acceptance of these outage problems (which sort of makes sense given their track record of endorsing incompetence *cough* most recently anything to do with Mr. Bean *cough*) and the fact the former head of BELCO is now a PLP candidate?
OMG Give it a break! I guess the rain deficit is the Governments fault, may as well throw in the invasion of Lion Fish, you ppl make me nauseated!
The PLP doesn’t regulate rainfall or fish migration. As the Government, however, they do have a legislated responsibility to regulate BELCO, a monopoly provider.
Perhaps the paradigm of accountability doesn’t resonate with your concept of a responsible government? Perhaps, like Minister Burgess, you don’t think it necessary to follow all the rules, all the time especially if they were in existence prior to 1998? Or perhaps 14 years of incompetence have dulled your expectations of competency?
Um, actually not quite the whole picture, 32n. The Energy Act certainly empowers a regulatory body called the Energy Commission to regulate rates, but it is emphatically not in the control of Government, you can find it on Bermuda Laws website. Before that, and in fact beginning in UBP times, it was the Price Commission. Yes, the process of appeal is such that the buck stopped with the Minister, but the process is a lot less ‘black and white’ than you suggest. Pun very much intended. Furthermore, let’s stop and think for a minute about what happened when times were good for all of us? Where and when, this question is for BELCO and many of us alike, was there savings for the future? Right. Given out in profits to shareholders in the case of BELCO and spent on a whole pile of stuff we could have lived without in the case of most of us regular folk. So, now we learn to live without. We live with power failures and we live with fewer trips away, less of many things, but we still live relatively well compared to most of the world. Compared to how things used to be for us, well, this sucks. But is it Government’s fault? Not so much in as direct a way as you think.
Also realize that diesel is only used over at BELCO for their peaking engines, not for their base load engines. Base load engines actually use a different, typically less expensive (and dirtier) fuel, so the price of diesel really wouldn’t make a very big difference in the rates. You can look that up on the Platts website and on BELCo’s. You’ll find that fuel costs more these days, all those pesky Chinese wanting to drive cars and run lights, after all. We should just tell them to stop? Look at the fuel surcharge in Barbados, it’s not cheap there and they’re closer to oil sources than we are. It’s not just us.
Don’t mistake me- I am no fan of this Government, certainly not of BELCO’s, but I’m not sure about the alternative in the OBA, either. And it’s not quite right to blame it all on Government, either. Sure, there is some blame most definitely placed correctly there- but not all of it.
What a “Load Shedding of SKI*.
Every Board Memmber should show their bank accounts………………..
Nothing here all abroad.
Jus like de Caribbean!
Get used to it….more’s coming!!
“load on BELCO’s system has been high for a Sunday, with demand at about 105 megawatts.” May have something to do with the last day of the olympics. Everyone is home wathcing tv with the AC at full blast. Belco should have anticipated a higher load.
I heard the increased load was due to all those new hotels that were built during Ewart’s Platinum Period. The island must be full of tourists.
Oh never mind. Must have been heat stroke when my power went out. AGAIN.
I dunno if they were watching the Olympics though. The screen would have went blank anyway! Again I say, Bermuda is supposed to be one of the most affluent countries in the world yet energy, cable and internet services and third world.
Get used to it. Power cuts are commonplace in third world countries.
Perfectly said I third world standard so enjoy what you voted for !
Just imagine Bermuda losing total power…in the dark in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with no a piece of land in site for 650 miles. Sheesh…talk about dark ages.
Maybe it’s time for a new power company to come in to release the stranglehold BelCo’s monopoly has on the Island…if only I had THAT kind of $$$$. Competition is good…
Go for it! Go & find enough people who will put up the tens of millions necessary to set up the infrastructure to create a new power company. Anyone can start another power company. It would take a fool & foolish shareholders to believe that tiny Bermuda has demand enough for two power companys to be viable.
BELCO has operating costs that go well into the hundreds of thousands per day, perhaps over a million a day.
This is just Belco’s way of getting what they want…..were they not”turned down”…all these ‘power failures’ I guess will eventually get them what they want…Very rarely use inappropriate language when posting a comment but …F*^k Belco…they are just ‘screwing’ the people of Bermuda…and because they are a monopoly they will continue to do so…..All that money that they are charging people is ridiculous…I am not home during the day..I do use my ac at night (sometimes)…I opened my bill this month and it’s over $700 and thats for ONE month…last month it was almost $600!! NEVER had this problem until THEY said my meter had to be changed and every since THEY installed the meter my bill has been outrageous….and f*&K anybody that wants to take Belco’s side and agree with their fees, etc…you want to impress me..come and pay my bill!!!!! the only ones that won’t complain are the ones that work Belco (they get a huge discount) and the shareholders because they are “smiling all the way to the bank!!!!”
I’m ready to go back to dipping water and dragging the kerosene lamps out of the shed and telling Belco to come get their meter because I will no longer be needing their services….
I wish for one day that everyone would ban together and not use one drop of power for the day…see how they would feel with no income for that day…….
I’m using a pen name from a previous posting… “Call the election please” so the government can stop getting blamed for everything, even Belco’s negligence!! I’m also not a fan of everything the government has done or is doing, but the blame here rests squarely with Belco. Investing in infrastructure is part of their responsibility!! Like everyone else, our household Belco bills have risen steadily year over year.. a family of 3 with typical household usage and we’re paying over $400 per month during the summer months. Surely, the ONE power company in Bermuda can keep it’s physical plant up to date and running with the type of revenue they are bringing in on a monthly basis, if our one bill is any example! Enough already Belco. Sort it out!! And for one of their workers to have the audacity to rudicule paying customers on this website is just plain unacceptable. Must we remind them that the ‘whiny piblic’ pays their salary?! Ridiculous…
I absolutely agree! Seems that our current government is not the only ones who have gone to the well too many times wether needed or not. The belco accountants must be absolute numpties to not have balance the books proper enough to have something left after decades of business to upgrade. Now the bottom of the buckets dropped out they want to penalize there costumers for their mistakes of not putting aside for another sooner.
Here’s an idea for belco’s owners TAKE A FRIGGIN PAYCUT all around. You all must be swimming in it already so you won’t starve. Any major shareholder who complains about government is a hypocrite because they’ve done the same thing with business funds that plp did.
I’ll live by candle light, dip water & find myself an old time icebox before getting bent over by belco.
This is only going to strengthen their case of a rate increase be it deliberate we don’t know…
Belco wants to raise prices but their efficiency is terrible! Third world standard if you ask me! When are we as Bermudians going to stand up?
They are not. Its much easier sitting down……..On a wall.
This is the type of s&.t you see in the Phillipines or Bangladesh. Perpetual power outages. It’s turning into a real banana republic.
While many of us suffered our 4th or 5th power outage in the past two months, maybe you don’t know what the shareholders of Belco are doing. While we have to replace damaged equipment (yes, electrical appliances and equipment get damaged when the power comes back on), Belco’s shareholders continue to rake it in. In 2011, the Ascendant Group shareholders (owners of Belco) declared dividends through the year amounting to a staggering $24,198.00 PER DAY. Yes, that’s $24,198.00 in dividends PER DAY.
nothing but payback for not agreeing to the latest request for a rate increase…they will say had you given us the rate increase we would have built another generator so its our fault…..anyone notice that the fuel increase has gone from 16.5cents to 17.5 cents to 19.5 cents for one month and then 20.5 cents this in a market of declining fuel costs…..oh well…..no rate increase just increase the subsidy by 25% over 6 months…same are a rate increase and no one will know…..at least Belco is not run by the BIU
We have far less ex-pat families on this island compared to two to three years ago. How in the world was Belco able to handle the load when Bermuda was at its max capacity yet all of the sudden with far less people on the grid, they can’t handle it? I am totally confused.
Welcome to the Third World – all it takes to run a prosperous place into the ground is for the majority of honest, hard working, diligent people to be cowed, intimidated, and coerced
hello
hello 2
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hello 4
these guys want to help belco lets give them a chance
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