Power Plants

Once again the power has gone off in Hope Town. The power in the out islands comes from the main island of Abaco, through huge 18,000 volt cables run underwater to all the other islands. Keep in mind that this isn’t like running cables out in the deep ocean, since the Sea of Abaco is only about 7-12 feet deep, and they just lay these cables on the bottom. The water is so clear, that you can see them crisscrossing their way across the sea bottom when it is calm out. This gets a bit tricky when it is rough and boats are anchoring near shore. Some of these cables go right to people’s houses, along with their phone lines, so you can imagine how many cables are out there. Every year there are incidents when people snag the cables with their anchors and they have to leave their anchor there, call the Bahamas Electric Company (BEC), and they eventually send a boat out to free your anchor. However, sometimes the power and/or phone lines get cut, and then they have to splice in a cable, or put down new ones (there are so many out there and you don’t know which ones are live, which could make it a shocking experience to say the least!), so the island loses power and/or phone. Here is a picture of some of the cables, which is a bit scary considering we were in 4 ft. of water when I took the picture.



It’s not just the boaters that cause the power to go out, since the power is very unreliable in the islands, especially since there is so much development going on now, and this puts a huge stress on the system. When we first got to the Abacos this fall, there was a small fire at the BEC station, and that caused total outages for a day, and then roaming outages for a week while they tried to repair the damage. A new larger power plant is under construction on Abaco, but it is very controversial since they want to use Bunker C Oil to run the gigantic generators. This could be very harmful to this pristine environment, since it is a ‘dirty’ fuel. Last we had heard they may change to diesel, but then it will cost way more to run, and naturally the increase in cost will be passed on to the residents. Even now the power costs about 50 cents per kwh, compared to about 10 cents back home.

As I sit here on New Horizon, listening to the generators humming on shore (almost all homes and businesses have them because the power goes out so often), I think about how reliable our power on board is. Our electrical power comes from eight golf cart batteries that runs through an inverter that changes the 12-volt power to household AC current. Although we have lights, stereo, TV, water pumps, bilge pumps, and electric toilets on board, our main power consumer is the refrigerator. Unfortunately, it uses so much power that it exceeds what solar panels or a wind generator could provide. In order to recharge the batteries, we have to run our 10.5 kw generator about 3-4 hours per day. The generator is run by a 4 cylinder, 25hp Kuboda diesel engine. It uses about ½ gallon of fuel per hour and we have a 600 gallon total capacity in 4 different tanks, and diesel fuel currently costs about $4.10/gallon. We usually split the battery charging time up so that we can make hot water in the morning, sometimes also doing laundry in our washing machine, and then watch TV or DVDs at night while recharging. At this time we also fill our water tanks (200 gallon total capacity in two different tanks) using the reverse osmosis watermaker. This process still amazes me how we can take salt water, run it through a strainer then a 30 micron filter, on to a 5 micron filter, then it is put through two membranes at 800psi of pressure that squeezes the salt water out, leaving us with the pure fresh water that goes into our tanks at the rate of 14-15 gallons per hour. We certainly have lots of systems to keep in good working order, but that’s what allows us to have all the comforts of home. This is life off the grid.