ILOILO City – Already incensed by the seemingly unending prolonged and frequent power outages, consumers here were tormented by yet another 13-hour scheduled brownout yesterday, with MORE Electric and Power Corp.’s (MORE Power) maintenance work at the La Paz substation affecting a wide swath of the district.
La Paz substation mainly caters to the transport and port hub of Iloilo and is one of the major anchors for commercial activities in the city. Hence, power interruptions not only bring inconvenience but may also cause serious economic losses.
“This 13-hour brownout plunged one-third of Iloilo into darkness once more,” said Engineer Aldren Deleste, operations manager for planning of Panay Electric Co. (PECO), referencing on the power outages pummeling the city in the midst of the double whammy of scorching summer months and the coronavirus pandemic through the months of March to May.
Worse, added Deleste, “these chronic power outages remain unabated even at the start of rainy season this June, a way for MORE Power to cement the stature of Iloilo City as ‘the brownout capital of the Philippines.’”
Yesterday’s scheduled brownout was from 4 a.m. to 5 p.m. covering La Paz district (feeders 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5). MORE Power claimed the maintenance of the La Paz substation was due to its overloaded condition.
Deleste, however, debunked this, pointing out that when PECO was managing the power distribution facility in Iloilo City, the La Paz substation was actually “underloaded.”
Citing a third party technical audit undertaken by Singaporean firm WSP Consultancy Pte. Ltd., the PECO engineer conveyed that full-scale maintenance work was carried out at the La Paz substation in 2018; and that particular facility was rated “underloaded” during the audit process.
As affirmed in the 2018 audit report, “out of the 50-megawatt capacity of La Paz substation, under PECO’s watch, it was only loaded with 33MW which was technically 66 percent only of the full capacity,” said Deleste
This clearly negates the claim of MORE Power that the facility is overloaded and that should also debunk the basis of the maintenance work it is pursuing, he added.
“It seems MORE Power is trying to exaggerate the volume of its maintenance work to make it appear that PECO was negligent even if this is untrue, and even if it means suffering for the people of Iloilo City because of the long and more frequent brownouts,” said Deleste.
For well-experienced power distribution firms with extensive knowledge, he pointed out, it is a technically acceptable industry practice to undertake “comprehensive maintenance every five5 to 10 years based on proper daily monitoring and monthly predictive maintenance (PM), or what is known as condition-based maintenance.
“The fact that MORE Power needs to do comprehensive maintenance means it has not been monitoring it and doing proper PMs,” said Deleste. “It also shows that MORE Power does not seem to know or understand the equipment, and that circles back to technical incompetence, which in turn causes inconvenience to the people of Iloilo and putting unwarranted blame on PECO.”
For the La Paz substation, in particular, WSP Consultancy noted that “the capacity of generation seems adequate to cater to peak load demand of the PECO distribution network. The peak load observed in 2017 was at 110 MVA (mega-volt ampere), which is within permissible limits of generation capacity.”
WSP Consultancy has deep and extensive multi-disciplinary expertise in energy infrastructure globally – spanning through planning, designing, building and operating a power plant; as well as in the automation, technical processes and ensuring reliability across the supply chain that include transmission and distribution of electricity to consumers.
As could be culled from the all-inclusive outcome of that technical audit, PECO noted that under its watch, “comprehensive maintenance was done at the La Paz substation in 2018 without any major outage,” contrary to the prolonged brownouts distressing Iloilo City consumers in line with the maintenance activities being undertaken by MORE.
According to Deleste, when PECO did comprehensive maintenance, it logged a shorter downtime and service interruption of just eight hours, way shorter than the current harrowing 13-hour brownouts by MORE Power.
“Oil of the power transformer was filtered and parallel works were also done outside,” he added, emphasizing that “at the extent of this maintenance, the scheduled repair works only resulted in a scheduled outage of eight hours.”
In contrast, said Deleste, the maintenance work of MORE Power is not as comprehensive but “surprisingly required longer hours.”/PN
