Company News, Energy Oct 5, 2021 5:16 PM
Energy service in the seven departments of the country’s Caribbean coast has improved in the last year.
Since Afinia and Air-e took over the operation a year ago of the Caribe Mar and Caribe Sol markets respectively, the service has improved by more than 20%, Portafolio reported.
Afinia reported a 17% quality improvement over 2019, and 12% this year. Air-e reported a 32% improvement in quality.
“Decreasing the average number of outage hours per customer per year from 121 to 99 hours by 2020 demonstrates our commitment to quality,” Afinia’s Javier Lastra said.
Air-e’s John Jairo Toro recalled that the average number of service suspensions in Atlántico, Magdalena and La Guajira was 120 hours per year, and even in some rural areas it reached more than 400 hours, but they expect to close the level to around 70 hours.
They highlighted that the goal is to continue lowering the average number of hourly interruptions.
“In our case, we received an obsolete infrastructure, overloaded by more than 100%, and whose useful life was deteriorated. More than 30 lines, 70 high load transformers and 150 medium voltage circuits were about to collapse, which led us to rethink our investments,” Toro said.
Both companies have disbursed in the last year investments to improve infrastructure for about CoP$1T.
“Investments in infrastructure have been CoP$427B during this year and it is expected that by the end of 2021 the amount will be close to CoP$540B,” Lastra said.
Air-e is working on 330 projects, with investments of CoP$350B, and for the next five years, resources are estimated at more than CoP$2T.
In addition, network maintenance activities have increased by 35% from 127 to 172 brigades.
“The plan is to invest CoP$8.7T over the next 10 years, of which CoP$4.8T will be developed in the first five years,” Lastra said.
Bottom-Line: The arrival of these companies is great news for the Caribbean region, and the results are starting to show in a short time.
However, improving service quality will take time, but it seems like the companies are on the right track to achieve it.
Now if only they can be assured of payment to support these capital expenditures.
