ZAMBOANGA CITY, Zamboanga Sibugay—The daily eight-hour power outages in Zamboanga City, which has plagued the highly urbanized city of about a million residents, appears to have been resolved by the Zamboanga City Electric Cooperative since last Sunday, a top agency official said.
According to Zamcelco Board of Directors president Omar Sahi, the Energy Regulatory Commission has provisionally granted Zamcelco to draw power of 50 megawatts directly from the Western Mindanao Power Corp. diesel power plant based at barangay Sangali.
Sahi said ERC Chairman Jose Vicente Salazar and Commissioner Victoria Yap-Taruc signed the provisional authority Friday afternoon through the support of Rep. Celso Lobregat, vice chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations handling the Energy Cluster.
Zamcelco’s proposal to purchase 50 MW from WMPC upon the expiration of the WMPC/NAPOCOR contract last Dec. 12, 2015 was taken up during the power forum here, with Energy Secretary Jericho Petilla, National Electrification Administration Chief Edita Bueno, ERC lawyer Francis Juan and other concerned officials in attendance.
Zamcelco general manager Edgardo Ancheta said henceforth the co-op’s hourly demand of power supply allocation from 1:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. is 37 MW from PSALM, 17 MW from TMI, and 8-9 MW from MAPALAD for a total of 52-9 MW; from 6:00 a.m. to 12 midnight—27 MW from PSALM, 10 MW from TMI, and 35-39 MW from WMPC for a total of 76 MW.