AN Aboitiz-hosted lunch between the editors of the three local papers and the top executives of Aboitiz last Monday showed that brownouts do not discriminate against anyone, not even those who source out the power.
Power went out in the area where we had our lunch at a posh Mexican restaurant in Banilad, Cebu City. It was an embarrassing moment for our hosts, particularly for Visayan Electric Company (Veco) president Jimmy Aboitiz, but we made no fuss about it. These days, brownouts are a natural occurrence like rain and Belo anti-aging solutions.
So why are we having frequent brownouts these days? How soon can we have stable power? What is being done to address the power shortfall? How does Basti Lacson, Aboitiz’s chief reputation officer, keep himself so fit and goodlooking amid the power crisis?
In a nutshell, we have brownouts because Veco is rotating power through its consumers because there is not enough supply being generated by the power plants. Some of these power plants are scheduled at this time of the year for efficiency check and are therefore generating power way below than usual or perhaps none at all.
Meanwhile, other power plants, probably because they’ve been there since the time of Moses, have been conking out on a whim and therefore have been unreliably producing the supply required. It is the unplanned shutdowns of these old power plants that aggravate the limited power supply.
Cebu now has more people and industries using electricity but the current supply barely meets the minimum demand. There is no buffer or reserve power such that if one power plant does not generate its requirement, there is little to transmit to the distributor like Veco, which supplies the power to the households and other users.
The absence of electricity wreaks havoc on the relationship between parents and their school-age children who use the brownout as an excuse not to study, and therefore fail the exam. It also vexes employees whose Facebooking is interrupted because they’ve been advised to use the computer to a minimum to save its power.
Furthermore, it feeds the imagination and fosters lust. And we’re just talking here of the effects on the ordinary Veco consumers.
We have also to consider the effects of the brownouts on the Veco people like Ethel Natera and the call center agents who indefatigably and patiently explain to each irate caller and Speak Out letter sender why we have the brownouts. Thel, why do we have the brownouts again?
As soon as the power plants are done with the so-called preventive maintenance work, they will be generating their regular power requirement. But since the old power plants cannot be relied upon to produce their requirements, Veco, the main power distributor in Metro Cebu, has contracted additional power supply from two new plants, Cemex’s APO Cement Corp. and Cebu Energy Development Corp.
Veco has adopted the interruptible load program (ILP) wherein big power consumers such as malls and factories are encouraged to use their generators during a shortage. The ILP allows Veco to divert supply to light users such as households.
On the part of the households, they can shift their use of electricity to off-peak hours, which are outside of these periods: 10 a.m.-11 a.m., 1 p.m.-3 p.m. and 5 p.m.-8 p.m. Also, they might try using compact fluorescent lamps (CFL), which use less power but light a bigger area.
As for the Basti part, there is one explanation: He just is, peak hours or off-peak, brownout or none.