Power utility giant Manila Electric Company (Meralco) has registered P10.9 billion worth of capital expenditures (capex) utilized within January-September period this year, with many of its capital projects on accelerated pace of implementations after the lockdown.
According to Ronnie L. Aperocho, first vice president and head of networks of Meralco, the utility firm already spent 88-percent of its earmarked capex this year, with resumption of many projects post-enhanced community quarantine (ECQ), based on the enforcement of the government in March to May this year.
“With the reversion to GCQ (general community quarantine), Meralco began to fast-track the implementation of catch-up and critical capex projects,” he said.
The Meralco executive emphasized that despite the pandemic, a total of 600 poles have been relocated to underpin the continuing implementation of the government’s Build, Build, Build (BBB) as well as Private-Public Partnership (PPP) infrastructure projects.
These included BBB projects like the North Luzon Expressway-South Luzon Expressway (NLEX-SLEX) connector road; Skyway Stage-3; Light Rail Transit-1 Cavite Extension; Metro Rail Transit Line-7 (MRT-7); C-5 South Link; Cavite-Laguna Expressway (CALAEx); C3-R10 Road; Philippine National Railways (PNR) North 1; Skyway Stage 2 Extension; and SLEX toll road projects.
The power firm specified that on top of those, 579 poles were also moved or transferred for the road widening projects being advanced by the Department of Public Works and Highways.
And due to the manifest increase in household electricity usage because of the work-from-home (WFH) arrangement and online learning of students during the pandemic, the company said it similarly implemented emergency capex programs that included installations of transformer load monitoring and accelerated distribution transformer, among others.
The company stressed that it monitored a total of 12,950 incidents of distribution and secondary level outages as of end-September this year because of higher heat index and abrupt increase in load, hence, it needed to immediately implement warranted system reinforcements.
The utility firm explained that it was able to achieve improvement in distribution transformer load, through the installation of 330 distribution transformer monitoring equipment into its system.
Meralco indicated that it also put up a new 150 megavolt ampere (MVA) transformer bank last September “to resolve critical overloading of the existing transformer banks” at its Malolos substation.
“This shall provide the needed capacity to meet the load growth in Bulacan and Pampanga within the Meralco franchise area,” the utility firm emphasized.
The company likewise completed the 115-kilovolt San Mateo-Diliman-Marikina line, which is a new eight-kilometer sub-transmission line backbone stretching from Commonwealth Avenue up to Batasan-San Mateo road.
“This shall serve the San Mateo substation which is currently under development and expected to be completed by the second quarter of 2021,” the power utility company said.