Napocor: Full power restored

State-run National Power Corp. (Napocor) reported yesterday that electricity was fully restored at 9:30 p.m. Friday, some 16 hours after a massive power outage that crippled Metro Manila and most parts of Luzon.

Napocor president Federico Puno said power should have been fully restored earlier as the problem could easily have been fixed in seven hours.

"We could have fully restored the system had it not overloaded as a result of a second tripping at 10:35 a.m.," Puno said.

Technical trouble at the 500-kilovolt San Manuel-San Jose line in Pangasinan triggered the power outage at 5:41 a.m. The second tripping was later traced to a system overload affecting lightning arresters and transformers at Napocor’s San Jose sub-station in Bulacan.

The San Jose sub-station is connected to the San Manuel sub-station in Pangasinan by the 500-kilovolt line. Electricity coming from the northern Luzon power plants pass through the San Manuel substation, which in turn transmits to San Jose, down to Metro Manila and several areas in southern Luzon.

Last December, more than half of the nation’s power supply was knocked out by a failure at a generating plant in Sual, Pangasinan, which feeds the power line that failed yesterday, when an estimated 50 tons of jellyfish suddenly swam into the plant’s cooling system.

In that blackout, repair crews took nearly 24 hours to fully restore power in Luzon. Most areas, including Metro Manila, were without electricity for more than six hours. Last Friday, parts of Makati City were energized within three hours of the power failure.

Meanwhile, Energy Secretary Mario Tiaoqui reiterated that Napocor experts have found no evidence of sabotage related to last Friday’s blackout.

"The full restoration of power should dash all speculations of sabotage. The outage was a purely technical problem," Tiaoqui said.

A flurry of rumors of sabotage and a possible coup attempt against the beleaguered administration of President Estrada was set off Friday by the massive power failure that cut off electricity to millions of people in most parts of Luzon.

The Philippines suffered from daily 12-hour power outages in the early 1990s because of the country’s small number of aging generators.

The government later liberalized power generation to solve the problem.