Meralco: 1.9M customers hit by brownouts during May 13 Luzon red alert

Nearly two million customers of the Manila Electric Company (Meralco) were hit by power interruptions, lasting about two to three hours, on Wednesday afternoon to evening when the Luzon power grid was under red alert.

On May 13, the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) placed the Luzon grid on its operating reserve margin, which stood at 595 megawatts (MW) with an available capacity of 14,153 MW against a peak demand of 13,558 MW.

The grid operator issued the red alert after a total of 3,942.8 MW became unavailable due to forced outages at dozens of power plants.

The NGCP implemented manual load dropping (MLD) or rotational brownouts to maintain the grid’s integrity.

Meralco said it was asked by the power transmission firm to implement MLD given the red alert.

“The rotating service interruptions affected about 1.9 million customers in portions of Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, Metro Manila, Quezon, and Rizal,” the power distributor said.

Services were fully restored at 12:14 a.m. on May 14.

“We would also like to acknowledge the support of our ILP (interruptible load program) customers that adjusted their operations to help ease demand and manage the situation yesterday,” Meralco said.

“Rest assured that we are monitoring and managing the situation and will provide updates as needed,” it said.

Following the NGCP’s declaration of yellow and red alerts in the Luzon grid on Thursday, May 14, “we immediately asked the support of our commercial and industrial customers under the Interruptible Load Program (ILP) to help ease the demand.”

“If necessary, we are ready to implement manual load dropping (MLD), or rotational power interruptions, as part of our responsibility to manage the system,” it said. —VBL, GMA News