Capelco incur P.5M losses a day due to brownout
ROXAS CITY – Not only electric consumers hate the occurrence of brownouts, power distributor Capiz Electric Cooperative, Inc (Capelco) hate it too as it causes them losses of some P500,000 a day.
Engr. Edgar Diaz, general manager of Capelco, said in a press conference held at Dante’s Café last Friday, that due to the shortage of power supply given by generation companies, the cooperative has no option but to conduct a rotating brownout in the municipalities usually from 8:30 a.m. o 8:00 p.m. and sometimes up to 9:00 p.m.
Power consumers in Capiz complained of successive brownouts in the past few days.
Diaz said, Capelco has 104,203 member-consumers in the whole province including the component city and it purchased 100 percent power supply from the generation companies.
He said that Capelco has a power supply demand of 23 MW however, the supply is only 14 MW with a deficit of 9 MW equivalent to 9,000 kilowatts or a loss of some P500,000 a day for the cooperative.
Diaz said that the cooperative introduced the short and medium terms solutions by getting power supply from other sources like Panay Power Corp., Salcon Power Plant in Dingle, Iloilo and PSALM /NPC to supply the power to cooperative during the peak hours.
He added, the other temporary solution is that the cooperative should intensify its efforts to disconnect member-consumers who are not paying electric bills and encourage them to shut off lights and appliances when not in use.
The long term is that in the last quarter of 2010, the Capelco will have a power source from the Panay Energy Development Corp. (PEDC) Coal-fired power plant in Ingore, La Paz, Iloilo City where all cooperatives in Panay island including Capelco already signed the Power Supply Agreement (PSA).