QC, Marikina to benefit from Meralco’s 3rd digital sub-station

MANILA — Power consumers from Quezon City and Marikina City will also benefit from the Manila Electric Company’s (Meralco) sub-station inaugurated Thursday at the Robinson Land Corporation’s (RLC) Bridgetowne property in Pasig City.

The substation, which uses an integrated and fully-automated gas-insulated switchgear (GIS), has an initial capacity of 85 kilovolts (kV) but its maximum capacity is expected to be around 115kV.

In his speech during the inauguration ceremony, Meralco president and CEO Ray Espinosa said the PHP1 billion worth substation will result in an exponential expansion of the 31-hectare mixed-use condominium and its surrounding areas.

Espinosa said from being an industrial area in the past decades, the location of Bridgetown has been transformed into a modern upscale business and residential district outside the cities of Makati, Mandaluyong, and Taguig.

This development, he noted, is “bringing in more prospects for employment and investment and a chance for Filipinos to enjoy the live-work-play lifestyle.

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“This is an example of what a mutually beneficial partnership can achieve and I hope that we can replicate this with our other business partners,” he added.

Espinosa, in a media interview, said they are also building more state-of-the-art power stations in Eton in Quezon City and Southwoods, among others, and these are expected to be operational by 2020.

“This is a future-proof substation already. It can take on the growth for the next 20 to 30 years,” he said, adding the sub-station uses fiber optics.

Meralco senior vice president and head of networks Ronnie Aperocho, during the same event, said the Bridgetown sub-station is Meralco’s third digital facility.

The other two are in the city of San Juan and the grounds of the Philippine Gaming Corporation (Pagcor) in Pasay City.

Aperocho said at least three more similar substations will be built in Manila and Quezon City.

The cost of each facility depends on the number of transformers, which fetches around PHP500,000 each, he said.

Aperocho said they have retrofitted the distribution utility’s sub-station in Antipolo to make it digital, and is currently monitoring the effect on its operations to determine if they can also do the same to their other analog sub-stations.