Sudden plant outages trigger power interruptions in Manila, Philippines

More than 20% of the power was shaved off the grid.

Large parts of Metro Manila and nearby provinces suffered outages as several power plants malfunctioned Tuesday night. According to the country's largest power distribution firm Meralco, about 1400-1600MW of electricity went off the grid in 4 power plant areas at around 7:40 pm. "The emergency power interruption was restored at 8:50pm," Meralco said.

Joe Zaldarriaga, Meralco's spokesperson, said in an interview that Meralco was distributing 5300MW of power prior to the brownout. He added that the power deficiency was over 20%. 

First Gen Corp, the country's third largest power provider, said that their Santa Rita, San Lorenzo, and San Gabriel power plants crashed at 7:31pm.

The cause of the incident is sill under investigation.

The outage came amidst an assurance from the Department of Energy that there is no looming power crisis in the Philippines. Asian Power previously reported that Energy secretary Alfonso Cusi said that the department is already doing its job to ensure there is ample supply and avoid a power crisis.