
Is it just me, or does it feel like that under the new management of Negros Power Corporation, unscheduled brownouts or power interruptions now take longer than they used to?
Last Saturday the power went out in my area at around 6am and came back just before 9am. It took almost three hours for the new guys to restore power. That evening, the power went out again, and took around 30 minutes to return. A few days later, another 30-minute brownout hit just before dinner time. The day after that, around 4 hours of the afternoon was spent powerless, all in my area alone.
Maybe I’m just getting frustrated at the new guys who sold themselves as better but can’t seem to get their act together quite yet, but if I remember correctly, the response time for these kinds of annoying incidents used to be way less than 30 minutes. Scheduled weekend crap was common, but unscheduled 3-hour brownouts that used to be rare has now become commonplace.
Perhaps the crews responding to the problems are not familiar with the system and its history, and that is why troubleshooting is taking so much longer. It could be like buying an old car and then not knowing the service history, so they have to be extra careful when something goes wrong, whereas with the old owner, they knew exactly what to whack or kick to get it going again if it breaks down. If this is their problem, they should just hire the old mechanic, especially if they claim to have a P5 billion budget for “improvements.”
Aside from not knowing where to look automatically, maybe they are just more cautious this time around, reading and following the instruction manuals in the dark, compared to the CENECO guys who were quite possibly more reckless with protective equipment trip offs, which could result in quicker response times for consumers but shorter service life for the equipment.
Maybe the new guys don’t have the autonomy to make snap decisions in order to restore power, and have to file a request and await approval from the proper departments before they can do anything. Whatever is the difference or cause, it’s annoyingly taking them a lot longer now and when it comes to power, that time difference is pretty annoying for most of us, especially those who believed that there would be improvements.
Power failures are taking much longer these days and until the NEPC guys hit their stride, I guess it is something we will just have to get used to and prepare for.
Brownouts are not new, we have had plenty of experience with it, even during the CENECO days, and those power interruptions are probably the reason why we became so apathetic towards the cooperative when it was being taken over by a private company.
However, when it comes to unscheduled power interruptions, our experience with CENECO has shown that it doesn’t usually last very long. In most cases, the power will come back after a few minutes, which can make it quite annoying if you just went through the process of turning off the main switch, going outside to start a tiny genset by hand, and connecting it to the mains, only to reverse the process once the power comes back.
Back then, knowing CENECO’s track record, we could afford to wait a bit, around 5-10 minutes after power goes out, before doing anything drastic such as turning on the gensets. Only if the power is still out by then is it probably worth the effort of resorting to genset usage.
These past few days, when the power goes out, you know that it’s 30 minutes minimum. Looking at the FB page of Negros Power, which is unsurprisingly filled with power interruption announcements, confirms that sad metric. That’s a 300% increase in response time, if CENECO’s 10 minutes on a good day is the baseline. As for the frequency of unscheduled power interruptions, I can confirm from personal experience that it’s been pretty bad. The past week (7 days) alone, my area must’ve lost at least a total of 7 hours of power, all unscheduled. That’s probably more than my CENECO total for 700 days (2 years more or less), if you exclude natural disasters and super typhoons.
The impact for most homeowners is that our emergency power systems and responses will have to adjust from the CENECO standard that we were used to, to the NEPC standard that we have been experiencing since it took over. In the case of my home which has a battery backup for the important stuff, we have to change our response protocol to using even less power to make sure it lasts longer, since we now have to take the currently terrible response and resolution time into account.
I also need to get that tiny generator that I got to use very rarely back in the day, checked up, because it looks like it is going to get some decent run time if this current NEPC regime is the new abnormal.
Other than that, we can only hope and pray that the supposed savior, NEPC, do hit their stride soon and get better at responding to unscheduled power outages, so we don’t have to think about bigger investments in backup power for our homes. That would be a crying shame, especially after we were told things were going to get better, especially where it really matters.*