A City, Relit: MORE Power Marks Five Years – and Breaks New Ground

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

The mood in the room was part reunion, part retrospective. Five years after MORE Electric and Power Corporation took over a beleaguered grid, the people who had watched the city’s power transition – and governed, financed, and at times doubted it – gathered to see how the story had been set down. The occasion held two tenses at once: a coffee-table book that looked back, and a freshly turned patch of ground that pointed forward.

That book, “Illuminating Iloilo: MORE Power’s Grounding Milestones,” is the company’s first, and it makes no pretense that the early going was graceful. Launched Tuesday alongside a short film tracing the utility’s arc, it chronicles a takeover that began in late February 2020 – and a lockdown that landed 15 days later, before the new operator had so much as finished taking stock. “We couldn’t even enter the barangays,” President and CEO Roel Z. Castro recalled, casting the volume less as a trophy than as a record of how unforgiving the beginning was.

There was candor, too, in how Castro described those first forays. With no playbook for taking over a utility and little experience to draw on, he admitted he had assured Iloilo’s political and business leaders that his team knew exactly what it was doing – an assurance he now calls, plainly, a “lie.” It was a necessary one, he said: what he held was not certainty but faith in the people beside him.

The guest list read like a roll call of Iloilo’s officialdom. Gov. Arthur “Toto” Defensor Jr. and Mayor Raisa Treñas were joined by Reps. Janet Julienne “Jam Jam” Baronda and Kathryn Joyce “Kathy” Gorriceta, along with USWAG Ilonggo party-list Rep. James “Jojo” Ang. Energy Secretary Sharon Garin and Energy Regulatory Commission Chair Francis Juan sent word by video. The speakers kept returning to a single idea: that dependable electricity had quietly become a precondition for investor confidence, and for the city’s wider momentum.

The achievements the book documents are, by nature, unglamorous – which is rather the point. New substations, Automatic Circuit Reclosers, and a SCADA-driven command center make up the machinery of a modern grid, the kind that stays invisible until it fails. Chairman Stephen George A. Paradies credited the turnaround to employees, partners, and stakeholders rather than any single hand. Yet the company’s reach has crept well past the meter: underground cabling that has tidied the skyline, mangrove plantings and fingerling releases into the Iloilo River, and heritage landmarks that now glow after dark – civic flourishes from the same utility that keeps the lights on indoors.

If the book closed one chapter, the groundbreaking opened another. MORE Power unveiled the façade of its forthcoming MORE Power Tower and turned the first soil – a literal cornerstone for a company that, by its own admission, never expected to outgrow Iloilo City. It has. Service now extends beyond the capital, and Castro was candid that contentment is not on the agenda. “I can’t just sit here and be happy,” he said.

A grid, like a city, is judged less by its brightest night than by its steadiness on ordinary ones. Five years in, MORE Power has earned the right to print its own history. The more interesting question – the one that freshly broken ground now poses – is what the next five and beyond will demand. (Photos courtesy of Todo Media)