Dear Sir,

Under the cynical title of “Energy reality v political rhetoric” (The Royal Gazette, August 26, 2025), Wayne Caines embarrassed himself and his firm by putting his name to a blatantly political fabrication in order to try to convince Bermudians to put political pressure on the Regulatory Authority and the Government to grant Belco/Algonquin’s long-held wish to invest hundreds of millions of their customers’ dollars in a liquefied natural gas infrastructure that benefits no one but Belco and Algonquin.

I parsed the piece carefully looking for some underlying truth to no avail. The piece is misleading from start to finish and clearly directed only at what he asks for at the end: Belco is still pushing for LNG at public expense, and doing nothing else.

On August 6, in response to criticism from area MP Jason Hayward, managing director Nadir Wade got a page one spot to echo the subtle message in plain English:

“…. the company’s long-term strategy was to move away from a reliance on heavy fuel oil……..Any transition to an alternative fuel source would aim to reduce emissions and soot fallout….”

This was followed by clips of Belco engineers saying much the same thing — even though they should know better.

Then there was the generally thoughtful Letter to the Editor on August 28 by Thad Murdoch in response to the Caines missive, which reached exactly the wrong conclusion — ending with a call to switch to any more expensive fuel, including LNG, immediately rather than just taking steps to stop the emissions.

This all amounts to what can only be described as a propaganda campaign around the idea that the only solution to the soot problem is to burn LNG.

To be blunt, this is just not true.

Between the Government, the Ministry of Health and the RA, the ability exists to force Belco to deal with the soot problem and continue to burn inexpensive heavy fuel oil without the negative effects on their neighbours. More to the point, this would be done without adding any costs to everyone’s electric bill.

Instead, I get the very bad feeling that the RA is about to issue an integrated resource plan that will approve LNG as a fuel. I have no proof of this. The feeling is a bit like the feeling just as you trip — knowing you are going to fall, but all you can do is wait for the pain.

In addition to presenting a false choice, the conflation of the soot problem with “the environment” is cynically perverse.

Pretending that the soot problem is somehow happening because the RA did not approve LNG as a fuel is dishonest.

Algonquin’s business model of choice is to buy up utilities operating on “dirty” fuels and convert them to LNG, then buy renewables from third-party providers to achieve further carbon targets. The icing on the cake is that Algonquin’s roots are in the gas pipeline business so it could be the gas supplier. That is what it wanted to do with Belco. That is why the NPP machines were finally ordered as multi-fuel, but optimised not for the inexpensive HFO (so they would burn it without soot fallout) but rather for LNG (almost guaranteeing soot fallout).

The problem in Bermuda is that using LNG will be very expensive. Between shipping via small gas tankers and building a new transfer dock — and bulk storage and regasification plant and pipeline — the cost will run in the hundreds of millions. Belco/Algonquin wanted this extra cost to be passed on to Belco’s customers. This could only happen if the RA declared LNG was an “approved” fuel. When the RA looked at the extra costs, and risks, and “just said no” to LNG, Belco should have respecified that the engines be optimised to cleanly burn HFO. Instead, Belco was so sure that it would be able to prevail eventually that it stayed with the LNG specification.

This was 100 per cent a bad Belco decision.

The engine manufacturer would have known that burning HFO in these machines would result in not only small particulate discharges (as had been the case prior) but also accumulations in the exhaust systems that would then come loose and be discharged as the large, sticky agglomerated masses we see falling down near the stacks. The idea that this was not discussed between Belco and the manufacturer defies credulity.

These machines are routinely used on large ships. They operate in “multi-fuel” use all the time. There are also very strict emissions regulations on ships for gases — SOx and NOx — and for particulates. Most modern ships have exhaust gas scrubbers and cleaning systems that can remove such contaminants reliably. Similar systems could have been specified as part of the original NPP design but they were not. They could now be retrofitted to deal with the soot problem, but they have not been.

Simply stated, Belco has not dealt with this problem because it can get away with it and because it still expects to get permission to make us all pay for its LNG plant and to buy expensive LNG.

It needs noting that, from the earliest days of the soot problem, it has been possible for the RA and the Minister of Health to force Belco to solve the soot problem directly and quickly. Without going into detail, this would have required the Minister of Health declaring the soot a “nuisance” and declaring Belco and a group of its managers as responsible — imposing a remediation plan and a schedule of daily fines for each responsible party. Allowing the problem to continue would have incurred the daily penalties and would have quickly become far more expensive for Belco than fixing it.

Fair enough, since Belco created the problem entirely on its own.

Why this was not done then, nor since, is a question for the Government.

Recent comments, though, do not bode well. It looks like the Government has tripped and soon we will all feel the pain.

JAN CARD

Smith’s