While Filipinos are being crippled by the stifling heat of summer, parts of Luzon grid descended into unwanted brownouts or services interruptions due to the prolonged forced outages of power plants and aggravated by the tripping of one major transmission line on Tuesday.

In the franchise area of Manila Electric Company (Meralco), roughly 200,000 customers had been plunged into dismal power service interruptions lasting about 20 minutes.

Meralco conveyed its customers affected have been those in Caloocan, Paranaque, Pasay, Makati, Pasig, Mandaluyong and Quezon City for Metro Manila; then parts of Pampanga, Bulacan, Laguna and Quezon provinces.

System operator National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) belatedly declared ‘red alert’ condition for Luzon grid past 3:00pm; followed by arbitrary scheduling of power interruptions.

The consumers affected in the regional areas are those served by the electric cooperatives in La Union, Tarlac and Camarines Sur – and power service had been curtailed for 15 minutes from 3:30pm to 3:45pm.

The other areas which endured rotational brownouts had been those in Isabela and San Fernando in Pampanga, starting at 3:40pm and electricity services had not been restored as of latest NGCP update at 4:44pm.

The sudden red alert status for Luzon grid had been set for 3:00 to 4:00pm; then from 6:00 to 10:00pm – entailing power supply deficiency to satisfy consumer demand as well as in meeting the grid’s regulating reserve requirement.

The Department of Energy, National Electrification Administration (NEA) and the other power utilities cannot provide exact figures yet on the total number of affected customers in their respective service domains.

Until this time, the energy department cannot also give a definitive timeframe on when summer power supply situation in the country would improve – although some power generators had hinted that repair of some of the technically-glitched power plants may extend until the end of the month.

The latest incident which precipitated the catastrophic system failure in the grid had been the tripping of the 500-kilovolt (kV) San Jose-Balsik transmission line – and that compounded the simultaneous outages of power plants already pestering consumers since last week.

Despite suffering that consumers would have to endure from faltering power supply both in Luzon and Visayas grids, the industry regulator is not sounding off any strong leaning to penalize the culprit-industry players.