THE Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) recently unveiled its P40-million System Control Center (SCC), which is part of the company’s Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS) earlier approved by the Energy Regulatory Commission.
At the launching of Meralco’s state-of-the-art SCC head Ronnie Aperocho said the system enables the company to respond faster to any power-related problems detected by the system.
Aperocho, who is also Meralco’s first vice president, said the SCC offers real-time system visibility to improve situational awareness and faster turnaround time of outage resolution. The large multiple displays in a single-output platform, likewise, “accelerates operational decision-making.”
“Through the smart meters and total visibility at our system-control center, even before the customer would call us, we already deployed our crew to fix the problem. It’s part of the proactive service that we would provide our customers,” Aperocho said.
The new system will also allow Meralco to immediately and easily identify problem areas. It also provides for possible solutions to the outage problem.
“The good thing about it is we provide the intelligence to the system, when a particular segment of our system is affected, readily, we can isolate that system and restore power to unaffected portion of the circuit,” he said.
Meralco’s ADMS replaced its obsolete Operating Trouble Management System (OTMS), which was commissioned in 1998 when the company had less than 3 million customers.
Meralco said its current customer base, or more than 5 million, which is supported by a complex distribution system, has outgrown the capacity of the OTMS.