Negros Electric and Power Corp. is installing automatic circuit reclosers to reduce the number of consumers affected by power outages, NEPC president and chief executive officer Roel Z. Castro said Wednesday, October 3.
The automatic circuit reclosers will be installed within NEPC’s feeders, he said.
This ACRs will sectionalize feeders so when a fault occurs a power outage will affect a smaller section of their service area, he said.
NEPC ordered 40 ACRs and eight have been delivered, he said.
The cost of each ACR is about P500,000.
Hopefully by early first quarter of next year they will all be installed, he said.
An ACR is essentially a self-contained device with the necessary intelligence to sense overcurrents to time and interrupt fault currents and to re-energize the line by reclosing automatically, he said.
Castro assured that they are doing everything that they can to reduce power outages but they cannot do it all at once as there are a lot of repairs that have to be done on the aging distribution facilities of Central Negros Electric Cooperative.
Castro said they are also acting on power pilferage in barangays and commercial areas.
There are some barangays with 60 to 70 percent of their power being pilfered, he said.
He urged consumers who have complaints to reach them through their Facebook page or through text messages as their manpower is not capable of answering a huge volume of phone calls.*