ILOILO City – MORE Electric and Power Corporation (MORE Power) is bringing in an additional P1.1-billion investment to further improve its services in this southern city.
This has brought MORE Power’s total investments to P3 billion, according to Engineer Bailey del Castillo, the firm’s deputy head of network operations.
They worked on this budget to do rehabilitation works such as replacement of old poles and transformers, rehabilitation of substations and construction of the Banuyao switching station, construction of new substations, installation of protection systems, automatic circuit reclosers, and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems.
MORE Power has also uprated its power transformer at the City Proper substation while there is an ongoing construction of a new Megaworld substation.
Del Castillo said for the next three years or up to 2025, the approved additional capex will be utilized for continuing rehabilitation and upgrading of the five existing substations.
“Eventually after the 2025, there will be nine substations including the three new — the 36 MVA mobile substation, the Megaworld substation (ongoing construction) with the same 36 MVA capacity and newest, and the future Arevalo substation which we need to construct because this will be at the tail-end of the grid. So to address low voltage and systems loss, we also need an additional substation at Arevalo area,” said Del Castillo.
The new 36 MVA mobile substation is set to arrive in July this year and this will signal the immediate start of the rehabilitation of the five substations.
This new mobile substation will be first parked at the Molo substation which will be rehabilitated because its structures are already very old.
“We will replace those structures as well as the old and obsolete equipment. But we will utilize power transformers and other equipment that we can still utilize or are still in service,” Del Castillo added.
After the Molo substation, the next to be rehabilitated is the Mandurriao and La Paz substations, and the last stop of the mobile substation will be the Jaro substation where it will permanently stay by the end of 2025.
IMPACTS OF THE IMPROVEMENTS
Del Castillo noted the big impacts of these ongoing investment in the power distribution system’s stability and reliability, as well as to power quality.
He said the new additional substations are expected to result to an improved voltage regulation while the system is expected to become robust with the loop distribution system.
“When we construct all of these and rehabilitate, magiging loop na ang system natin. Right now we are only radial connected but with these new upgrades and constructions, we will loop the nine substations. If there are some problems or maintenance, interruption will be very short because we can immediately transfer from one source to another because we have already enough capacity unlike this time ang capacity natin is limited — if a substation will be out, hindi natin pwede ma-transfer or ma-load to the adjacent substation because of the limited capacity,” he explained.
Complementing the system is the installation to the network of 34 automatic circuit reclosers and the load break switches. With these devices, power restoration can be done immediately when there are outages.
Moreover, Del Castillo also noted that they have started the installation of tree wire conductor, the very first in Iloilo.
This wire is a bigger and upgraded one and wrapped with a layer of track-resistant covering unlike the existing bare wire. With these covered wires, outages due to birds, gecko, tangled kites and especially the vegetation can now be avoided.
“We are excited on this tree wire installation project. This is one of the highlights of our investments,” said Del Castillo.
The installation has actually started already from La Paz Feeder 4 and Feeder 5 and will continue up to La Paz plaza.
Tree wire expansion is also ongoing in Molo – Feeder 3 area going to Arevalo as well as from Diversion Road to Megaworld in Mandurriao up to Mandurriao plaza.
These and other ongoing projects and programs of MORE Power are expected to be completed in the next three years./PN
