How MORE Power rebuilt Iloilo’s grid – and what it wants to build next

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

MORE Electric and Power Corp. inherited a distribution grid that was bleeding 28 percent of every kilowatt-hour it bought — more than five times the regulatory ceiling — and clawed the figure down to within the Energy Regulatory Commission’s 5-percent cap in roughly four years, president and chief executive officer Roel Z. Castro said, crediting a blunt-force tactic he settled on out of desperation: posting 250 security guards over severed illegal connections until the households behind them applied for legal service.

“I was so desperate already,” Castro said in an interview on Bilyonaryo News Channel’s energy program Power Shift. His crews would cut a jumper, he said, and his own people would tell him plainly what came next: sige sir, putulan natin, pero uma-umaging gabi babalik yan. Somebody would simply reconnect it that night.

So he called in his security manager. “I told him, you hire 250 guards.” A hundred twenty-five on the day shift, 125 at night, stationed at the pilferage hotspots his teams had already mapped. Alongside them went a house-to-house campaign with a single message: the guard does not leave until you apply.

The compliance rate, by Castro’s account, was near-total and fast. “Over a period of a few days, they would tell me, ‘Sir, mga 90 to 95 percent na nag-apply.'” At that point the guard was pulled and the applications processed.

The stakes were arithmetic. Under ERC rules a distribution utility may pass only capped system losses on to consumers; everything above the cap the company absorbs. At 28 percent against a 5-percent ceiling, MORE was eating 23 points of loss every month. Losses fell to roughly 10 percent within the first year, Castro said, and inside the cap by year four. The utility’s most recent public figures show system loss still tightening — from 5.37 percent to 5.20 percent — a gain it has cited in passing rate reductions to Iloilo City consumers this year.

From 62,000 customers to 107,000

Iloilo City’s metered customer base has grown from about 62,000 accounts at takeover to roughly 106,000 to 107,000 today, Castro said. But the bulk of that 72-percent increase was not new construction in a fast-growing city. It was the conversion of households that had been stealing power.

“Actually mas dumami during the time of COVID,” he said. “And this was really the conversion of those illegal connections.” In the first year alone, he said, more than 10,000 applications came in.

The scale of that number is its own indictment of the years before. It implies that at the point of transfer, something close to one household in six inside the franchise area was drawing electricity without an account.

MORE Power took over the Iloilo City distribution system from Panay Electric Co. in early 2020, under Republic Act 11212 — the 25-year legislative franchise signed in February 2019 that displaced PECO, whose own 1922 franchise had lapsed on January 18 that year. The transfer was litigated hard; the Supreme Court ultimately upheld the constitutionality of Sections 10 and 17 of the law, which authorized MORE to take the incumbent’s distribution assets upon payment of just compensation.

Castro does not soften how that landed locally. Ilonggos were skeptical for three reasons, he said, and he can still list them: the corporate vehicle used was a mining company whose primary purpose had to be amended at the Securities and Exchange Commission; he had never held a position in the distribution business; and he is not Ilonggo.

“Will you really be helping us? A mining company who has no experience coming into Iloilo, and you’re not Ilonggo — so what’s the assurance that you will actually do better than the previous DU?”

His answer, he said, was to stop arguing credentials. “Delivering service for me is something universal. My biggest asset is that I am also a consumer.”

The waiver that unlocked informal settlements

The mechanism behind the customer surge was a document, not the blue guards.

Industry practice required an applicant for a service connection to prove ownership of the land or the house. Castro asked why. Because the odds of an owner moving away are low, he was told — it protects collections. He checked the statutes, he said: the electricity reform law, the Department of Energy rules, the Magna Carta for Residential Electricity Consumers. “Wala naman nakalagay that there has to be proof of ownership.”

It was practice, not law. And the alternative his staff proposed — securing the landowner’s consent — was, he argued, self-defeating: no owner will sign a document that reads as a proxy for tenure.

What MORE devised instead was a waiver signed by the informal settler: I want electricity, I am not after ownership of the land, and when the rightful owner comes and asks for disconnection, I will voluntarily give it up.

“Access lang talaga,” Castro said. “Access to service.”

It has since been exported across the Razon group’s distribution footprint. “It’s now being done in Bacolod, it’s now being done in Negros, it’s being done in Bohol where we’re operating.”

That footprint is now substantial. Primelectric Holdings, the group’s distribution arm, entered a joint venture with the Central Negros Electric Cooperative in June 2023 to form Negros Electric and Power Corp., serving more than 220,000 accounts across Bacolod, Bago, Talisay, Silay, Murcia and Don Salvador Benedicto. In late 2024 it acquired majority control of Bohol Light Co. in Tagbilaran. MORE Power’s own franchise was extended by Republic Act 11918 into the towns of Iloilo province’s 2nd and 4th districts — an expansion the Supreme Court upheld in July 2024 — with a further bill covering the 1st District moving through Congress this year.

Burying the wires on Calle Real

MORE Power buried its distribution lines along Calle Real at roughly ten times the cost of overhead wiring, and Castro argues the payoff was reputational as much as technical.

“We’re not the first DU to actually do an underground distribution system,” he said. Davao got there first. “But I think the difference is, dito parang na-highlight siya — because number one, it is within a very historic and heritage area.”

The roughly ₱96-million Underground Distribution System project, begun in 2023, took about a kilometer of overhead line off the streets of the old central business district, from Arroyo to Aldeguer, making Iloilo City the first in Western Visayas to do it.

He is also quick to puncture the impression it created. Friends told him the whole city had gone underground. “Sabi ko, hindi ah. Kasi mahal — that’s about ten times more expensive. We’re just putting it on strategic areas.”

The companion move cost far less and may have travelled further. Castro says he pitched the mayor on floodlighting the city’s heritage churches — “Mayor, why don’t we light up the churches? Make it attractive. Parang Europe, you have the rustic.” They did Molo and others. Then Instagram did the rest. “So dami-daming curious, ano ba yan sa Iloilo?”

Next on his list is Calle Real’s wider heritage district.

The commercial argument sits underneath all of it. Iloilo’s growth drivers, Castro said, are business process outsourcing first, then tourism, with banking and government services long established. His pitch to investors and to the local government is a promise about capacity: “You bring any investor. We are ready.”

Designing the smart meter instead of buying one

MORE Power has stopped shopping for an advanced metering platform and started writing its own specification.

Castro said he surveyed the available technology on a recent trip to the United States and came away unimpressed — not with its quality, but with its fit. “The technologies are good, pero it is not really designed for us.”

So he inverted the procurement. “Sabi ko, kami ang mag-design, kasi ito yung tingin namin appropriate for us. Then you come in and say if your technology will be able to support it, when we look at the cost.” The design phase is underway and vendors are already being approached.

The logic driving it is a tiering problem regulators across the country will recognize. Some consumers want consumption and voltage data at five-minute resolution. Most want an accurate bill at the end of the cycle. Both would pay for the same meter under a blanket rollout. “So yan yung binabalanse namin ngayon,” he said, adding that only what is genuinely needed will go into the utility’s next rate-reset filing. He is championing it personally.

Artificial intelligence is further along. Six years of operating data has accumulated, Castro said, and almost none of it has been interrogated. Helpline staff log calls efficiently; nobody reads the aggregate. “To look at the big data and then find the story — nobody’s doing that.” AI is now being pointed at exactly that: where the brownouts cluster, and why.

He draws a firm line at the output. “At the end of the day, the AI will not decide.”

The 11 a.m. problem

The detail that best explains why any of this was necessary is buried in Castro’s due-diligence list — 25 to 30 items long, he estimates.

Customer service in Iloilo City used to close at 11 in the morning. And billing, he said, had stopped being based on meter readings altogether: it ran on assumptions and averaging. Consumer trust in the utility, on his telling, was already gone before the first jumper was ever cut.

The fix was almost embarrassingly literal. Every meter, every reading, photographed and timestamped. When a customer disputes a bill, the utility opens the picture. “Ito yung ano ninyo last month, ito yung picture, ito yung number sa picture.”

It also produced its own backlash, the kind that comes with fixing things. Replace a customer’s dilapidated meter with an accurate one and consumption registers higher. “Pinalitan ninyo yung metro ko, tumaas yung bill ko,” Castro recounted. Naturally, he said. The old meter was under-reading. “So we had to face all of that.”

The Goliath question

Asked whether the Razon group intends to become a giant in power distribution, Castro insists the expansion was never designed.

“To start with, we never had any plans of expanding. To be very honest.” When Enrique Razon asked him to run the Iloilo utility, he said, there was no growth mandate attached — and there was a fairly clear alternative outcome. “If you don’t succeed, then you’re fired.”

What pulled the company outward, he said, was demand from across the boundary lines: consumers in Iloilo’s 2nd and 4th districts asking why power was cheaper and steadier on the other side of the highway, then Bacolod, then Negros. “The consumers actually clamored.”

The map now runs well past that. Primelectric holds three Visayas utilities — Iloilo, Bacolod and Bohol — and is contesting Batangas cooperatives against Meralco in Luzon, while in Mindanao a 70-30 venture with former senator Manny Pacquiao’s holding company has proposed a multibillion-peso rescue of the South Cotabato II Electric Cooperative serving General Santos, a bid drawing organized local opposition.

Castro frames even that as inbound rather than acquisitive. “We’re not actually looking for size. If there are DUs, customers, that are wanting and clamoring to have our kind of service because they’ve seen Iloilo — now they’re seeing Bacolod, they’re seeing Negros — I will consider.”

Whether the regulator sees it the same way is the open question. An electric cooperative is, in theory, non-profit. An investor-owned utility has room to earn — and, the argument goes, therefore room to invest. Iloilo is the case study either side will cite.