Rotational blackouts hit Meralco customers

MANILA, Philippines — Close to two million residents in Metro Manila and nearby  areas in Luzon experienced rotational power interruptions on Saturday due to insufficient supply, according to the Manila Electric Co.

Meralco said it implemented manual load dropping (MLD) or rotational blackouts that lasted an average of 1.5 hours starting at 2:17 p.m.

Affected areas included parts of Metro Manila, Batangas, Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, Pampanga, Rizal and Quezon.

The MLD was intended to limit power demand after the Luzon grid was placed on red alert from Saturday afternoon until midnight.

A red alert is raised when supply is insufficient to meet consumers’ power demand and the grid’s regulating requirement.

The National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP) said the  available capacity of the Luzon grid was 12,706 megawatts while peak demand was 11,995 MW.

Meralco said all services were fully restored by 11:47 p.m., prompting the NGCP to lift the red alert status at 12:35 a.m. yesterday.

“Due to significant power supply deficiency, rotational power interruptions had to be implemented across Luzon including Meralco’s service areas to manage the current system condition,” Joe Zaldarriaga, spokesman and head of  Meralco’s corporate communications, said in a statement.

Meralco said more than 200 MW of de-loaded capacity was secured, which helped mitigate the impact of the red alert raised on the Luzon grid.

“We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience caused by this situation. We continue to exhaust all demand-side management efforts to help minimize, if not avert, power interruptions,” Zaldarriaga said.

Meralco assured its customers that it is ready to activate the interruptible load program if necessary, saying it is continuously monitoring the grid’s condition.

As of 10 a.m. yesterday, the NGCP said the Luzon grid was under normal condition.

The Luzon grid has been placed on yellow and red alerts several times this year due to forced outages of several power plants.

The NGCP said that last Saturday’s alerts were due to the outage of the Ilijan Block A&B.