Iloilo City hit by 13-hour brownout anew

Iloilo City suffered a 13-hour brownout over the weekend due to the maintenance shutdown by power distributor MORE Electric Power Corp. at its La Paz substation.

In a statement, the city’s former distribution utility Panay Electric Co. (PECO), said the MORE’s maintenance works at the La Paz substation affected one-third of Iloilo City on Sunday.

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.

This 13-hour brownout plunged one-third of Iloilo into darkness once more,” Engr. Aldren Deleste, operations manager for Planning of PECO said.

In a separate statement, MORE said the power outages in Iloilo City resulted from maintenance works as the company alleged it inherited from PECO a “rotting distribution system."

MORE said transformers installed by PECO were replaced because it was overloaded due to numerous "jumpers" or illegal connections that were never profiled or included in the city’s load capacity, leaking with oil that serves as insulator or coolant of transformers, or damaged or burnt due to constant short circuits.

Deleste, however, debunked MORE’s claim that the maintenance of the La Paz substation was due to its alleged “overloaded” condition, saying that when PECO was managing the power distribution facility in Iloilo, La Paz sub-station was actually “underloaded.

Citing a report by the third party technical audit undertaken by Singaporean firm WSP Consultancy Pte. Ltd., PECO said that full-scale maintenance work was carried out in 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% only of the full capacity,” which clearly negates the claim of MORE that the facility is overloaded and that should also debunk the basis of the maintenance work it is pursuing.

“It seems MORE is trying to exaggerate the amount of maintenance work that they need to do to make it appear that PECO was negligent even if this is untrue and even if it means suffering for the Iloilo people because of the long and more frequent brownouts,” Deleste said.

For well-experienced power distribution firms, they have an extensive knowledge and it becomes an inherent and technically acceptable practice in the industry to undertake “comprehensive maintenance every five to 10  years based on proper daily monitoring and monthly predictive maintenance (PM), or what is known as condition-based maintenance,” according to PECO.

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 consumers in line with the maintenance activities being undertaken by MORE.

MORE, for its part, said it is undertaking a three-year modernization program for Iloilo City’s distribution system, amounting to P1.8 billion. -NB, GMA News