 Responsible for a basically residential market - representing 42% of the total energy consumption in Piauí State - and with a power transmission system consisting of 2,571.54 miles (4,285.9 km) of lines and 61 substations, Companhia Energética do Piauí (Cepisa) is the state electricity distributor. Its mission is to cover an area of 252,378.6 square kilometers and a population of over 2.8 million. Quite a responsibility, says Osvaldo Pereira dos Santos Junior, engineer in charge of the company's information technology area, and even more so when taking into consideration that there must be fast secure connections with offices and substations over a thousand miles from the head office in Teresina.
"That is in fact why we chose to use satellite services, such as Datasat Plus, and more recently Movsat Mini M", he says, emphasizing that Embratel won the bids for the contracting of these services and has been giving a very good performance as supplier, combining quality services and technology with a fast efficient attendance.
Efficient administration
Santos Junior says that Cepisa has already been using the Datasat Plus services for four years: "We therefore managed to integrate practically all our units, so that today we have every information directly in the DPC in our head office. Thanks to this system, all commercial administration data, for example, is already online. We were also able to expedite our customer service, which is our priority, and make our maintenance area more efficient, since we monitor all substations and units to provide repairs and maintenance as soon as possible."
Movsat Mini M, he says, was a complement to the telecom infrastructure, enabling telephony by satellite, used currently for maintaining the power lines: "If we detect in our system a broken post in the middle of the woods, wherever it may be in the state, we are able to make immediate contact with the nearest crew and repair it. As a result, we prevent power cuts and offer the population better and more reliable services."
Cepisa has an urban power distribution system covering 7,179 miles (11,965 km) of networks and 261,075 posts, plus the rural distribution with 10,593.6 miles (17,656 km) of networks and 114,391 posts and 6,385 transformers, with an installed capacity of 361 MVA. It is aware that it has tremendous responsibility in a growing market, according to its data, at a rate of 6.4% a year.
Cepisa, a private and public joint stock company, incorporated in 1962, with Eletrobrás as majority shareholder in October 1997, provides electricity to 223 local governments in the state. "We therefore need partners in essential services, such as telecommunications, which offer us reliability and quality, as in the case of Embratel", deduces Santos Junior.
|
