MORE Power disputes PECO outages claim
By Lenie Lectura – August 3, 2020
from Business Mirror
More Electric and Power Corp. (MORE Power) on Monday disputed the claims of Panay Electric Co. (PECO) in a report on power outage incidents submitted to the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC).
MORE Power responded to the allegations of PECO that Iloilo City experienced 1,424 minutes of power outages from February 29 up to July 16, 2020.
“PECO manipulated the 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-out incidents that did not happen. PECO also counted a longer period than the actual period of brownout,” said MORE Power in its reply to a petition filed by PECO with the ERC requesting the restoration of its certification of public convenience and necessity.
PECO also claimed that the accumulated power outages for this period were much higher than the System Average Interruption Duration Index of PECO for the same period in 2019.
For its part, MORE Power said PECO engaged in “multiple counting.” More Power said it recorded a total of 182.13 hours of power interruptions during the period and not 412.20 hours as claimed by PECO.
“PECO inflated the figures by counting multiple times a single interruption event,” MORE Power said.
MORE Power said discrepancies appear in the computation of PECO, resulting in an additional 230 hours of interruptions that were “falsely included to inflate their computation.”
“Scheduled outages contributed a large portion of the duration of the power interruptions under MORE Power. 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.
Of the 182.13 hours of interruptions during the period, more than 50 percent was due to scheduled power interruptions by MORE Power.
“These interruptions were utilized by MORE to undertake much needed maintenance on the Feeders and Substations in Iloilo City. These Feeders and Substations were in a dilapidated state due to the failure of PECO to maintain them properly,” the company said.
Other power supply related are interruptions resulting from scheduled or unscheduled outages on lines or substations owned by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) or from a generator, force majeure and other factors, such as defective equipment, that MORE Power inherited from PECO.
“All these defective equipment resulted to about 51.57 hours of interruptions. As we stated before, these defective equipment are all part of the distribution system that MORE Power took over from PECO and are attributable to the poor or non-existent maintenance of PECO while it was operating the said distribution system,” it said.
