Power distributor More Electric and Power Corp. slammed Panay Electric Co. for allegedly inflating the power outage data in Iloilo City before the Energy Regulatory Commission.
MORE Power, in its reply to a petition filed by PECO with the ERC for the restoration of its certification of public convenience and necessity, said PECO “desperately wanted MORE to look bad.”
“PECO manipulated the MORE numbers to artificially inflate the figures. PECO not only double counted, it counted one brown-out period 16 times. PECO included in its count two brown-outs that did not happen. PECO also counted a longer period than the actual period of brown out,” said MORE Power.
PECO alleged that Iloilo City experienced 1,424 minutes of power outages from Feb. 29 to July 16, 2020 based on MORE Power’s Facebook updates.
PECO said MORE Power’s own social media report showed that the accumulated power outages for the period was much higher than the System Average Interruption Duration Index of PECO for the same period in 2019.
However, MORE Power said PECO engaged in “multiple counting” which was not in accordance with the mandated method of recording interruptions under ERC Resolution No. 12, Series of 2008 (A Resolution Adopting the Guidelines for the Monitoring of Reliability Standards for Distribution Utilities).
MORE Power said that from Feb. 29 to July 16, there were only 182.13 hours of power interruptions and not 412.20 hours as alleged by PECO.
“PECO inflated the figures by counting multiple times a single interruption event,” MORE Power said.
MORE Power also said it achieved a much better SAIDI than PECO, as “PECO wrongly compared its erroneous 1,424 power outage minutes computation under MORE to PECO’s claimed SAIDI of 629 power outage minutes for the same period in 2019”.
MORE Power said its scheduled outages also contributed a large portion of the duration of the power interruptions under MORE.
“These scheduled outages were necessary because of the need for urgent maintenance works on various aspects of the dilapidated distribution system that MORE took over from PECO,” MORE Power said.