Power retailer Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) said Sunday nearly two million customers in parts of Batangas, Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, Metro Manila, Pampanga, Rizal and Quezon were affected by the outages lasting an average of 1.5 hours starting at 2:17 p.m. on Saturday.
Meralco said in a statement that due to the red alert in the Luzon Grid on June 1, it implemented manual load dropping (MLD), but all services were fully restored by 11:47 p.m.
The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) lifted the red alert at 12:35 a.m. on June 2 as total unavailable capacity reached 4,682 megawatts (MW).
“Due to the significant supply deficiency, rotational power interruptions had to be implemented across Luzon, including in Meralco’s service areas, to manage the current system condition,” Meralco spokesperson and corporate communications head Joe Zaldarriaga said.
Meralco acknowledged the support of its commercial and industrial customers, which de-loaded a collective capacity of more than 200 MW as they helped in mitigating the impact of the Red Alert that lasted almost half of the day.
“We sincerely apologize to our customers for the inconvenience caused by this challenging situation. We continue to proactively exhaust all demand-side management efforts to help minimize, if not avert, power interruptions,” Zaldarriaga said.
Meralco assured its customers that it is monitoring the situation 24/7 and is ready to activate the Interruptible Load Program should there be a need.
NGCP said the Luzon Grid is under normal condition on Sunday.
The transmission company raised the red and yellow alert power supply situations on Saturday due to the outage of Ilijan Block A & B (1,200MW) arising from liquefied fuel terminal restriction.
A red alert status is issued when power supply is insufficient to meet consumer demand and the transmission grid’s regulating requirement.