By Manuel Cayon – December 17, 2020
from Business Mirror
Davao City—Davao Light and Power Co. Inc., an AboitizPower subsidiary, will likely retain its international standard certification following a 5-day audit by Cologne, Germany-headquartered evaluator for the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO.
Davao Light attained its re-certification for the ISO 9001:2015 or the Quality Management System (QMS) and passed the surveillance audit for ISO 45001:2018 – Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Management System and ISO 14001:2015—Environmental Management (EM) System as part of maintaining the quality service that it provides to the customers it serves, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.
The evaluation was conducted by TÜV Rheinland (TÜVR), an internationally accredited certification body that audits the compliance of an organization with international standards. It recently released an official report recommending Davao Light to remain ISO Certified after the 5-day audit.
In the report, the TÜVR noted zero major non-conformance and validated that all the requirements of the three certifications were met.
“Davao Light will continue to embrace the Integrated Management System to manage our company better. By advancing business and communities, we will continue to be a leading partner on the road to progress essential to the development of the communities where we serve,” said Davao Light President and COO Rodger S. Velasco.
Davao Light first received its QMS Certification in 2018. Meanwhile, certifications for OHS and EM Systems were received in 2019.
Control center
Hedcor, another AboitizPower subsidiary, recently inaugurated the group’s first Regional Control Center, which connects to Hedcor’s 5 hydro-electric facilities in Davao City and its four hydro facilities in Davao del Sur.
This center allows all 9 plants across Southern Mindanao to be operated remotely from a single control room.
Rolando Pacquiao, Hedcor vice president for operations, told the virtual inauguration that idea was first brought up in 2011, which eventually led to the automation of Talomo 3 Hydroelectric plant in 2013 and Talomo 2 Hydroelectric plant in 2014. The two plants located in Davao City are some of Hedcor’s oldest manually-operated plants, originally constructed in the 1950s, Hedcor said.
“This is actually our first milestone which gave us the confidence that we could do it moving forward,” Pacquiao said.
Following the automation of five plants across the Talomo grid in 2019, Hedcor started moving towards integrating its operations with the newer Sibulan-Tudaya Hydroelectric plants in Davao del Sur in 2020.
The Regional Control Center allows centralized real-time data monitoring and sends notifications to management to help them stay on top of plant operations, Hedcor said. It also features operations and reliability dashboards for performance tracking and outage analysis.
Hedcor has planned to integrate its Manolo Fortich Hydroelectric plant located in Bukidnon to the Mindanao Regional Control Center by 2021, while simultaneously working on plant automations of its hydroelectric facilities in Northern Luzon.
Hedcor specializes in generating renewable energy from run-of-river hydropower systems. It said it currently manages and operates 22 hydropower plants in Ilocos Sur, Mt. Province, Benguet, Davao, and Bukidnon. They supply the country with 278 megawatts of renewable energy.
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