AboitizPower to invest in ‘smarter’ facilities

MANILA, Philippines — Aboitiz Power Corp. is transforming its business by investing more in digital technologies in line with efforts to increase the efficiency of its power plants while reducing operational costs.

“In the Philippine context where we don’t have large R&D (research and development) centers, we, as a Philippine company, need to invest where we can bring down our costs and increase reliability,” AboitizPower chief corporate services officer Carlos Aboitiz told The STAR.

One of those areas, he said, is digital innovation, including the use of digital twins, or a virtual replica of a physical object, to create “smarter” power plants and bring more data-driven decisions.

With this technology, AboitizPower is able to understand more of how its power plants work and get new data before outages happen, which in turn could lower the cost of operating them, the official said.

“The more we do that, the lower the cost of the power we can provide, the more secure the power we can provide the country,” Aboitiz said.

Further, the company is also investing in artificial intelligence to optimize the trading of electricity in the marketplace.

For instance, AboitizPower is required to put in bids to trade in the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market and the co-optimized ancillary market every five minutes.

“That’s a very complex task. So we’ve created a model to allow us to ingest a lot of data and to put forward optimum trading strategies so that we can optimize the price at which we trade our energy,” Aboitiz said.

These technologies, he said, are enabling business models that help the company address the energy trilemma: energy security, affordability and sustainability.