Aboitiz subsidiary enforces digital upgrade on hydro regional control center

Hedcor Inc., the hydropower subsidiary of Aboitiz Power Corporation, has enforced digital upgrade on its regional control center that is linking its various hydropower facilities in Davao.

The newly inaugurated control center connects its five hydropower facilities in Davao City; as well as its other four hydropower facilities in Davao del Sur; hence, allowing all nine plants to be operated remotely from a single control room.

As narrated by Rolando Pacquiao, vice president for operations of Hedcor, the project began as early as 2011 – and it kicked off with the automation of its Talomo-3 and Talomo-2 hydropower facilities in 2013 and 2014.

He noted that these two facilities have been traditionally operated with manual controls because these were constructed way back in the 1950s.

Then from that initial milestone in the Talomo plants, Pacquiao chronicled that Hedcor’s digital journey moved forward with all of the company’s hydro generating assets in Davao.

“Following the automation of five (5) plants across the Talomo grid in 2019, Hedcor started moving towards integrating its operations with the newer Sibulan-Tudaya hydro plants in Davao del Sur in 2020,” the company expounded.

The next phase of integration into the digital loop will be Hedcor’s Manolo Fortich hydro plant in Bukidnon, and that is targeted to be concretized next year.

The full completion of Hedcor’s multi-year digitization and integration projects will be in 2024. By then, it was emphasized that the hydro facilities of the company will already be connected to a single national operations center, including its power plants in Luzon.

Hedcor President and Chief Operating Officer Carlos Aboitiz considers the digital transformation of the firm as “a bold course to automate, connect and integrate our entire fleet of 22 plants with a vision to operate our fleet from a single operations center.”

From the roughly 50 years of experience that the company has in its operations of hydropower plants, Aboitiz encouraged his team to “remember to look at how far we’ve come, take stock of what we’ve learned and forge ahead towards a future filled with new ideas and full of new possibilities.”

Given the latest system for the hydro facilities, Hedcor explained that the regional control center will allow “centralized real-time data monitoring and sends notifications to management to help them stay on top of plant operations.”

The digitalized control center similarly exhibits “operations and reliability dashboards for performance tracking and outage analysis.”