tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2325443341798286773.post54987721115114448..comments2008-12-11T18:53:48.167+08:00Joselito R Ruayahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12236864310075675945joselito.ruaya@gmail.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2325443341798286773.post-75505632326677362852008-12-11T18:53:00.000+08:002008-12-11T18:53:00.000+08:00Dr. Ruya - I've been wrestling with the technical system loss issue up close with a number of cooperatives recently. We have a wide diversity of utilities here in the Philippines when it comes to customer density along a feeder. There are some ECs with feeders that have 2 or 3 customers per km of line and there are some utilities that have feeders with well over 200-300 customers per km of line. Clearly, the technical loss will be different for such configurations at equal levels engineering design using best practices.<BR/><BR/>If a utility is blessed with the majority of it's feeders having high customer density (like most of the private utilities serving metropolitan areas), its technical loss will be much lower than a utility that has primarily low density feeders (like many, but not all ECs) - almost regardless of the engineering and investment practices used.<BR/><BR/>Also, some utilities that own 69 kV sub-transmission are able to dial-in the weighted effects of using high voltage conductor in their loss calculations - which distorts the comparison to a utility that is all 12kV distribution.<BR/><BR/>There are other (engineering) reasons that technical loss may differ between two utilities even if both utilities are using the same "best practices".<BR/><BR/>So I'm finding this a complex issue, in general. And that's just related to technical losses - and assuming one is able to reliably segregate technical losses from non-technical - a whole 'nother issue that hasn't been resolved here in the Philippines well. <BR/><BR/>None of this says anything about the validity of the ERC caps or the 5%-7% range you support. That seems about right to me, on average, across all utilities. But we're still left with how to discriminate between other physical characteristics of utilities - something that ERC totally ignores, it seems.Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10173927488646461044noreply@blogger.com