Negros Power Installs ACRs to Reduce Outages

By Dolly Yasa

Negros Electric and Power Corp. (Negros Power) President and CEO Roel Castro announced on Wednesday that the company has begun installing Automatic Circuit Reclosers (ACRs) to minimize the areas affected by power outages.

During a press conference, Castro revealed that the company has ordered 40 ACRs, eight of which have already been delivered.

An ACR is a self-contained device equipped with the intelligence to detect overcurrents, time and interrupt fault currents, and automatically re-energize the line by reclosing.

“Our experience with ACRs in Iloilo, where MORE Power, our sister company, is the distributor, shows that nearly 98 percent of faults come from momentary causes, such as branches hitting power lines. Without the automatic recloser, addressing such faults manually takes time,” Castro explained.

He added that it typically takes an hour to locate the fault and restore power manually.

“With the ACRs integrated into the system, we expect the number of feeder-level outages to decrease significantly,” Castro said.

He cited the Talisay feeder 3, which spans about 141 circuit kilometers, as an example.

“We divide it into three sections. If one section is hit by an outage, the other two will not be affected.”

Castro also mentioned that eight of the 40 ACRs have already arrived.

For instance, on Murcia feeder 3, which spans 236 kilometers and serves around 15,000 customers, two ACRs were installed on Sept. 7 and 8, with a third installation scheduled for Oct. 25. This will complete the sectionalization of Murcia feeder 3, he added.

“We expect more ACRs to arrive soon, and as they do, we will deploy them across our system, which covers 44 feeders. We will prioritize feeders in precarious situations, based on the number of interruptions we’ve recorded since Aug. 1, 2024,” Castro said.

Castro emphasized that the ACR installations have proven highly effective in reducing outages in Iloilo City, where MORE Power has seen drastic improvements in power reliability.