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.