Metro Manila (CNN Philippines) — Some areas in the Greater Metro Manila Area briefly lost power past 7 p.m. Tuesday night because of outages in several power plants across Luzon.
Parts of Batangas, Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, Metro Manila, Pampanga, Quezon Province, and Rizal were affected by the outages.
Meralco spokesperson Joe Zaldarriaga told CNN Philippines that power was already back again around 9 p.m.
“We’ve restored the power back to the last remaining areas that were affected earlier,” he said.
Citing the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) The Department of Energy (DOE) said the power interruption lasted for about an hour and 20 minutes (7:30 p.m. – 8:50pm).
Zaldarriaga explained that outages were caused by a lower power supply brought about by the power plant outages. “We got a report that there were several plants in the south that went offline,” he said.
The DOE said units 3 units of the Sta. Rita power plant (600 MW) and 2 units of the San Lorenzo power plant (526MW), both in Batangas, tripped.
It added that a second set of power plants also tripped:
San Roque in Pangasinan (95 MW)
Quezon Power in Quezon (452 MW)
Bacman in Sorsogon (136 MW)
Trans Asia in Bulacan (27 MW)
GN Power in Bataan(151 MW)
Based on Meralco’s initial data, it was unable to cover around 20 percent of the demand in its franchise areas. Zaldariagga said they had to cut power in some areas in order to balance the remaining supply with demand.
The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) also said on its Facebook page past 8 p.m. that the Luzon grid was on “red alert”. A red alert is raised when power reserves hit zero – there is no backup power and a blackout is very likely.
NGCP spokesperson Cynthia Alabanza said that the transmission service provider was back on normal operations at 8:50 p.m.
Meralco is looking into the incident and is coordinating with the NGCP. “Probably we’ll have a better view as to what happened, tomorrow,” Zaldarriaga said.
