NEA takes over electric cooperative in Catanduanes

The National Electrification Administration said it had taken over the First Catanduanes Electric Cooperative or Ficelco “to ensure proper delivery of electric service to member-consumers.”

The NEA, which supervises 121 electric cooperatives nationwide, also issued an order designating Orlando Andres as acting Ficelco general manager.

Andres, a project supervisor, has been tasked to manage Ficelco’s day-to-day operations and to ensure the cooperative’s operational efficiency.

“With NEA’s takeover, island residents are now assured of better electric services after months of persistent power outages when the cooperative was still under the leadership of its president, Alexander Hung,” the NEA said in a statement.

The agency said business owners, civic groups and church leaders in Catanduanes had “long been clamoring for the takeover of the island’s electric cooperative by NEA” as they were enduring six- to eight-hour daily rotating brownouts.

NEA said that, in a recent audit, it found out that the brownouts were due to the cooperative’s failure to establish proper system operations, dispatch protocol and power reliability measures despite the anticipated surge in power demand during the hot summer months.

In a related development, the NEA said it had rolled out the completion stage of its three-phase Business Intelligence Technology project, which harnesses advance data management to help boost electrification efforts.

NEA administrator Edgardo Masongsong said the online BIT system was designed to assist the country’s 121 electric cooperatives (ECs) in rural electrification.

“The NEA BIT is (now) complete (in terms of) the finance, institutional, and technical as well as project monitoring modules — paving the way to the new NEA wherein information derived from reports infused into the NEA are maximized to support our seven-point agenda,” Masongsong said in a statement.

Masongsong added that the information generated from the web portal would assist the NEA in gaining timely and holistic analysis on the EC’s current state and business operational performance.

Funded by the World Bank with technical assistance from IT firm Indra, the NEA BIT was a result of the collaboration between the NEA and the ECs through discovery and design sessions back in 2015.