NEA taps Cisco technology to monitor electric coops’ operations
By Alena Mae S. Flores – September 29, 2023, 9:05 pm
from manilastandard.net
State-run National Electrification Administration (NEA) and Cisco, a leader in enterprise networking and security, agreed to collaborate on NEA’s Digital Dashboard Command Center (DDCC) Project to improve the availability, reliability and efficiency of the power distribution systems.
The collaboration is aimed at accelerating NEA’s vision of 100-percent total electrification nationwide by 2028.
The NEA developed an accelerated electrification plan involving various on and off-grid solutions.
It intends to connect its Command Center dashboard and its new cloud-based platform, the NEA Business Intelligence Technology (BIT), to the supervisory control and data acquisition systems of electric cooperatives (ECs).
NEA administrator Antonio Mariano Almeda said that since its creation in 1969, the agency has been at the forefront of implementing the government’s rural electrification program in partnership with the 121 electric cooperatives around the country.
“We are committed to not only electrify homes, but to also transform lives, empower communities, and enable progress across our nation,” Almeda said.
The DDCC will collect and integrate multiple performance data sources from different ECs and other internal system applications across agencies.
It will map key metrics such as energy consumption, average power interruption frequency and duration on a single geographic information system for analysis and actionable insights.
The dashboard will also enable NEA to respond to any incidents or variance in energy performance and develop plans for more reliable power distribution service.
Benguet Electric Cooperative (BENECO) will be the pilot project of DDCC under Phase 1.
Phase 2, which is slated for the second quarter of 2024, will connect 60 ECs to the dashboard. Phase 3 will commence in 2025, connecting the 60 remaining ECs, with a primary focus on island ECs.
The initiative is part of Cisco’s Country Digital Acceleration program in the Philippines, UGNAYAN 2030, and is targeted at enabling timely and data-driven assessments of the performance of electric cooperatives across the country’s power grid in rural areas of the Philippines.
“With the Philippines’ growing population and industrialization, electricity will continue to be in high demand and how we allocate it becomes very important,” said Cisco Philippines country managing director Zaza Soriano-Nicart.
“Public-private partnerships play a critical role in delivering meaningful and sustained outcomes. We are harnessing Cisco technology in the Philippines to bring new opportunities to communities, drive new efficiencies for the energy sector and support the country’s sustainable energy agenda,” Soriano-Nicart said.
