WE ARE going to talk about our situation as legitimate power consumers of “I Am Iloilo City”.
Are we better off?
We have the right to ask that question.
As a journalist I have this platform to ask the very same question at the back of the minds of the natives of “I Am Iloilo City”.
I will just present the facts which are already public knowledge. No comments condescending or otherwise. Maybe with just a bit of sarcastic humor and leave it to the intelligent natives of “I Am Iloilo City” to discern and maybe have a little fun.
The facts are: infrastructure/investment, brownouts/jumpers and customer service/relations. Take note: there is no attempt at comparison although it may sometimes seem that way; I assure you it is just for points of reference.
We start with infrastructure/investment. As someone born and grew up in “I Am Iloilo City”, the most visible infrastructure from former power provider Panay Electric Co. (PECO) is that building on General Luna Street which used to serve as their head office and main control hub, the old sometimes falling down wooden poles with ageing meters, the ubiquitous “spaghetti wires”, and the substations that we eventually learned were poorly maintained.
Then we have this which came out on the Oct. 25, 2019 issue of Panay News:
PECO to spend P1.1B on innovations
Iloilo City’s power distributor Panay Electric Co. plans to spend more than a billion pesos on innovations to improve services and bring down power cost.
The P1.1-billion capex plan will be sourced from internally generated funds.
“For the next 10 years we have to put in about P1.1 billion,” PECO Public Engagement and Government Affairs head Marcelo Cacho told reporters in a media roundtable in Taguig City on Wednesday.
They were overtaken by events.
A new distributor took over and its first order of business was a massive overhaul and rehabilitation of the power distribution infrastructure left by PECO which is still ongoing.
And within the next five years it will embark on a “stream of capacity expansion”.
Brownouts and “jumpers”. We have to admit that during the watch of erstwhile power provider PECO there was no serious attempt to run after power pilferers or “jumpers”. In fact we have no idea of their extent until that study by MIESCOR which revealed 30, 000 “jumpers” are operating in the city.
It is a fact that these “jumpers” overloaded the system and were the main cause of electrical fires and brownouts.
What PECO did was just to charge the systems losses caused by these “jumpers” back to the legitimate power consumers which in turn gave the city one of the highest electric rates then.
It’s successor launched a massive campaign against these illegal power connections and to date from these 30,000 “jumpers” more than 12,000 have already been apprehended, 800-plus kilometers of jumper cables seized more than 50 individuals have been charged with violation of the Anti-Pilferage of Electricity Act and Theft of Electric Transmission Lines/Materials Act of 1994 which is a criminal offense.
Lately, there’s a novel approach to gather information to specifically identify and locate these illegal jumpers and resellers – a reward system wherein the informant who gives information upon verification receives a reward of P3,000.
Considering the risk and potential danger to the informant, this is all conducted with utmost discretion and the information given will not be used in court nor will the informant be required to appear as witness.
So are we better off? I say “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”./PN
