By Edwin Fernandez/PNA
COTABATO CITY – The Cotabato Light and Power Company (Cotabato Light), an AboitizPower-led distribution utility, is seeing rosy prospects in its franchise area in the medium term.
In a statement Wednesday, Cotabato Light anticipates a demand spike of 8.47 percent this year due to expected bigger loads soon to rise in its franchise area.
The demand within the Cotabato City-based utility grew by 14 percent to 32 megawatts (MW) in 2018 from 28 MW INB 2017. The firm’s customer base grew by a modest 1.3 percent from 41,110 in 2017 to 41,645 in 2018.
“We are very pleased with our growth in 2018 and (we would) maintain this trajectory moving forward,” said Ben Caro Arkoncel, Cotabato Light president and chief operating officer.
“We’ve seen impressive economic growth in Cotabato City, driven by the government’s efforts to bring in investors over the past few years,” Arkoncel added. These include the facilities and offices of the Cotabato Regional and Medical Center, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines, as well as a factory, mall, and hotel.
Cotabato Light also boasted of the improvement in reliability as a utility provider with the reduced average number of interruptions each customer experiences in a year from six in 2017 to 2.5 in 2018.
Also, the firm introduced reforms that dramatically reduced the average duration of power interruptions in a year to 122 minutes in 2018 from 811 minutes in 2017.
Arkoncel said such development can be attributed to the installation of line reclosers and load break switches, intensification of vegetation management, augmentation of line maintenance, putting in place wildlife shields to eliminate or minimize animal intrusion of power lines, improvement of substation maintenance, and upgrading of overloaded distribution transformers.
AboitizPower has earlier said it has set aside P3.1 billion to modernize its existing distribution assets across the country this year.
The distribution subsidiaries of AboitizPower include Davao Light and Power Company and the Visayan Electric Company in Cebu, among others.
