Veco to pilot prepaid power, smart meters

CEBU, Philippines - The Visayan Electric Company (Veco) will start several pilot projects to implement improvement of its services, such as prepaid electricity, underground cabling and smart metering.

Jaime Jose Aboitiz, chief operating officer of Aboitiz Power Corporation (AP)-Power Distribution Group announced that for the underground cabling alone, the company will start with the Capitol site-Fuente Osmeña project, implementation of which should have long been started if not for the holding of the recent elections.

Aboitiz said that the underground cabling program will incur at least P150 to P200 million for Veco every year for the major thoroughfare in its franchise area.

The pilot implementation of the prepaid electricity scheme, on the other hand, will start in two months.

Veco is hitting to deploy about 300 prepaid electricity metering, while the company has already prepared the standard transfer specifications (STS) platform to support the prepayment electricity scheme.

Prepaid electricity scheme is not only attractive to the budget conscious consumers, but also to other sectors in the electric consuming public, such as those that own condominiums, apartments, rest houses of vacation homes and boarding houses, among others.

Veco has over 340 thousand electric consumers in its franchise area covering from San Fernando in the southern part of Cebu up to Lilo-an in the northern part of the metro.

In 2009, the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) issued the rules governing the prepaid metering scheme for electricity, officially allowing distribution utilities like Veco to begin offering the service to their customers.

The scheme is expected to help residential customers manage their consumption of electricity.

With the issuance of rules, distribution utilities could file their applications with the ERC to offer paid retail electric service (PRES) to their residential customers, the commission said.

The PRES is an electric service that uses a prepaid metering system designed to allow a residential customer to purchase credit or load and then use electricity until such time his load is exhausted.

It is also expected not only to benefit consumers but also the distribution utilities because the service will allow for "operational efficiency."

Customers will have the option to apply for a prepaid retail electric service on a voluntary basis, subject to the availability of a distribution utility's prepaid electric service infrastructure.

The electricity rates will be the same as those charged under the existing post paid scheme, unless the distribution utility is applied and the ERC approves a different tariff for prepaid meters, ERC chairperson Zenaida Ducut said.

According to the ERC, the distribution utilities should also provide reasonable means from which the residential electricity consumers would have easy access to the purchase of the electric energy credit for 24 hours daily to ensure continuous electricity service.

The smart metering plan, will also have its pilot implementation soon, Aboitiz said while Veco is still perfecting the technology side of the smart metering system. This Veco service innovation will have its pilot tests within this year. — (FREEMAN)