WHILE IT is irritatingly disingenuous for Mr. Dean Peart, the Shadow Utilities Minister, to pester the regulators about the failure of the light and power company, Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS), to have installed systems to prevent the kind of electricity outage experienced by Jamaica last Wednesday night, we are somewhat sympathetic to his call for an urgent review of most aspects of the operation of the company.

However, our focus is primarily on the generation, transmission and distribution side of the business - that is, from production of electricity to its delivery to consumers. We want to ensure that electricity is generated efficiently, that it is delivered to consumers at the cheapest possible cost and that people can be assured of a sufficiency of supply.

But first, the issue of Mr. Peart's disingenuousness. In July 2006, Jamaica suffered an islandwide blackout when a fault at a JPS sub-station, then owned by Mirant Corporation, cascaded through the system. The Government and its Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR), dissatisfied with the company's explanation of the cause of the fault, demanded that it get independent experts, who recommended a series of corrective/preventative measures. A year later, in August 2007, Jamaica suffered extensive power outages.

Significantly, Mr. Peart was at the time a member of the Government, a Cabinet minister he did not carry the utilities portfolio. Indeed, Mr. Peart's party lost office less than three and a half months ago. In other words, the Government of which Mr. Peart was a member had more than a year to rigorously follow up the OUR to ensure that it was insisting that JPS, which has been acquired by Marubeni Corporation, was implementing the recom-mendations of 2006 by the Canadian consultants.

We are a bit wary, though, about ministerial pronouncements and dictation to the OUR on how it should go about its job - as was the case with Mr. Clive Mullings, the current utilities minister, in the aftermath of last week's power problem. The law does give the responsible minister authority to request 'advice' from the OUR, and any individual, theoretically, could request the agency to commence an investigation into a utility.

However, the legislation does give the OUR wide powers to act on its own initiative to ensure that utility companies provide adequate service and behave with responsibility to consumers. Moreover, this is one law where the Prime Minister has clear powers to remove the OUR director general if it is felt that he is guilty of neglect of duty, inefficiency, incompetence, misconduct or inefficiency. So, if the OUR does not perform, the PM can tell the Governor-General to remove the boss, which is what ministers should recommend rather than jump before cameras, blow hard and behave like OUR commissioners.

Perhaps, as the OUR suggests, JPS has been working on the measures to prevent the cascading of problems, as was recently the case. That, however, is a relatively cheap if, maybe, tedious fix.

The larger problem - this is where Mr. Peart's suggestion arises - has to do with the fact of the narrowing, near to the point of elimination, of electricity reserve margins.

We have long dithered on what kind of energy mix Jamaica should employ and decide on the least-cost option for implementation. If we don't act soon, the episodic power shutdowns like Wednesday's will soon seem to be a minor event.