posted June 16, 2020 at 09:05 pm by Alena Mae S. Flores
More Electric and Power Corp., a
company led by businessman Enrique Razon, said the power outages in Iloilo City
it inherited from the old utility Panay Electric Co. will be gone soon as its
P1.8-billion three-year modernization program is already underway.
MORE chief operating officer and
president Roel Castro said part of the company’s modernization program is the
installation of a looping system of the 69-kilovolt sub-transmission facility
to provide backup power supply whenever preventive maintenance and repairs are
conducted on any of the five substations around the city.
Castro said unscheduled and
unannounced power outages could be attributed to the combination of high
pilferage and unreliability of the old equipment.
“But we assure our consumers of
immediate response to these unexpected brownouts so we can hasten the
restoration of supply,” he said.
Castro said MORE replaced more than
130 transformers installed by PECO that were in danger of exploding or bursting
into fire from high temperature because they were either too old or not
subjected to maintenance operations.
MORE also replaced over 100 rotting
wooden electric poles with concrete ones to protect the system and the public
from falling poles, the official said.
The new Iloilo City distribution
utility started its upgrade of the dilapidated facilities and equipment of the
city’s distribution system as soon as it took over its operations in February
last year.
MORE completed the repairs of the
Jaro, City Proper and La Paz substations while the remaining two substations
will undergo the same works in the coming weeks.
Castro said they would also upgrade
the Jaro substation 10MVA and the City Proper substation 20MVA and rehabilitate
the other substations.
MORE is also preparing its
distribution system for the growing demand for power in the next 5 to 10 years,
Castro said.
The company is also expecting the
arrival of a 10MVA mobile substation to augment the capacity of the overloaded
substations.
MORE also replaced 138 distribution
transformers in the first three months of its operation to avoid explosions
that could lead to widespread and unexpected brownouts in the city.
Castro said that even before they
handled the distribution services, they conducted thermal scanning of the
distribution network and found out almost 900 “hot spots” that needed
corrections and repairs to avert more widespread and prolonged brownouts.
MORE is also addressing the problem
of jumpers or illegal connections which overload the distribution system, he
said.
“We already streamlined the
application of new connections in coordination with the local government so
that more jumpers, particularly informal settlers, will be enticed to apply for
connections. Aside from that, most of the jumpers found out that they will pay
less for their supply because we reduced to rates to at least P9 per
kilowatt-hour compared to P20 per kilowatt-hour they paid to individuals who perpetuate
the illegal connections,” Castro said.
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