VECO substation in Ermita foils worsening brownouts

CEBU, Philippines - The Ermita substation of the Visayan Electric Company (Veco) which is now renamed to Don Gil Garcia (DGG) Switch-yard and substation is able to spare Cebu from a three-hour rotational brownout after super typhoon Yolanda battered the Visayas region last year.

Veco engineering group vice president Valentin Saludes III shared that the electric company was able to save 60 megawatts share of power due to the reconfiguration in the DGG substation from one source of power to another just in time after the storm hit the country.

VECO earlier announced that the power shortage has reached from 40 megawatts to 100 megawatts, thus warning places within its franchise area of possibly rotational brownouts due to the damage to lateral lines and poles brought at the height of typhoon Yolanda.

"If not for the facility, it could have been more than 150 megawatts of shortage and three hours of rotational brownout. It was actually a good and timely thing that this substation was reengineered," Saludes stated.

In an earlier interview, VECO chief operating officer Sebastian Lacson said that the power supply "suddenly" became scarce and prices moved up when the super typhoon Yolanda wreaked havoc in the region especially in Cebu, Leyte and Samar.

Power distributors such as Cebu Electric Cooperative (Cebeco) II in Northern Cebu and those in Panay, Bacolod and Iloilo, were also affected. Two other power plants from Leyte such as the Tongonan Geothermal Power Plant and Unified Leyte were damaged.

Two other power plants from Leyte such as the Tongonan Geothermal Power Plant and Unified Leyte were damaged at the height of super typhoon Yolanda.

To address such, VECO got power feeds from Luzon plant to continue the power supply since the former has no reserve power plant to solve the rotational brownout.

Just three days after Yolanda, electricity services of VECO were nearly restored completely with 94 percent of its power supply regained for their franchise area from the town of Liloan in northern Cebu up to San Fernando in the south.

In commemoration of Don Gil Garcia who was VECO president for nearly 50 years, the DGG switch-yard and substation near the Carbon Public Market was inaugurated yesterday. It was graced by VECO president Jaime Jose Aboitiz and Board of Directors Chairman Ramontito Garcia.

It is considered to be VECO's oldest substation which has provided electricity to Cebu City's old commercial districts of Carbon, Magallanes, Pasil and Colon in the downtown area and stretching to as far as N. Bacalso Avenue to Basak, Pardo in the south of Cebu City.

The construction of the substation took almost two years with the renovation and upgrading works of that started in October 2012.

Saludes said that VECO invested around P140 million for the new system and equipment of the DGG switch-yard and substation.

The new substation features include state-of-the-art equipment such as fully automated switchboards, power transformers and circuit breakers called the condition based monitoring, switch-yard and OLTC automation. These equipments are remotely monitored via VECO Control and Monitoring Center of the company's Systems Operations Department (SOD).

Aimed at reducing operating and maintenance costs, the facility can provide a more flexible operation for the electric company.

Isolation of any breaker for maintenance work may be done without causing service interruptions and short circuits on any one of the buses will not interrupt service to any circuits.

"If one substation is damaged or lacks power, we can transfer power from one source to another without our customers knowing it. This is intended for reliability and increase of capacity to our distribution networks," Saludes explained.

The DGG switch-yard and substation will be the hub for VECO's 69-kv line. It houses four bays that can accommodate eight power sources. There are around 18 substations within VECO franchise area and

At present, VECO has five sources of power that are distributed through its 18 substations within its franchise area.

"In the future, if we have additional source of power, we can terminate it here," Saludes added. /JMD (FREEMAN)