Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) said over the weekend it launched a new grid management facility to handle the surge of smart meters, rooftop solar installations and electric vehicle charging stations across its franchise area.
The Grid-Edge Operations and Control Center (GEOCC) introduces a new operational layer to future-proof the power grid against a rapidly changing energy landscape, the company said.
The GEOCC does not replace Meralco’s existing System Control Center (SCC) but instead bridges a visibility and control gap at the low-voltage network level.
“The GEOCC brings together people, systems, data and analytics into a single, integrated operational environment,” Meralco senior vice-president and head of networks Froilan Savet said.
While the SCC manages 150 substations operating across high- and medium-voltage networks from 13.8 kilovolts to 230 kilovolts, it was never designed to handle hundreds of thousands of low-voltage endpoints.
Meralco operates about 200,000 smart meters, 20,000 net-metering customers and around 800 megawatts of distributed energy resources.
“And this landscape continues to grow, including EV charging and battery systems. This represents a major scale shift,” Savet said.
“From thousands of centrally controlled assets to hundreds of thousands of fast-acting, customer-side assets. And this is where the visibility and control gap becomes impossible to ignore,” he said.
The new center focuses on five core capabilities to manage low-voltage networks and customer-side operations. It converts smart meter data into operational intelligence for load profiling and quicker outage detection, and coordinates the safe operation of rooftop solar, smart inverters and microgrids.
The facility also manages electric vehicle charging to turn it into a grid resource rather than a risk, coordinates distributed batteries for load balancing and shifts operations from reactive to predictive.
“With GEOCC, we are not just adding technology. We are fundamentally improving how we operate the grid,” Savet said.
“It represents the next step in grid modernization: intelligent, distributed and resilient operations,” he said.
