Some areas experienced 6-hour blackouts yesterday (i.e., Edsa Ortigas) from 1pm to 7pm, and then again from 9:30pm (10/8) to 1:30am (10/9). What exactly is going on? Here’s what Meralco has to say about the brownouts / blackouts…
From http://www.meralco.com.ph/Consumer/news/meralco_NW04809.html:
TRANSMISSION TROUBLE CAUSES POWER OUTAGES TODAY
October 8, 2009 as of 11:30 amCustomers in certain parts of the Meralco franchise, mostly in the eastern part, will experience at least three hours of power outages today (Oct. 8), as the company implements manual load dropping (MLD) due to the technical trouble at the power transformer bank of Dolores Substation, owned and operated by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP).
The series of power outages began late Wednesday night (Oct. 7) in several parts of Metro Manila and Rizal after power was cut off to 13 Meralco substations including those situated in St. Anthony, Manggahan, Parang, Masinag, Marikina, Santolan, Cainta, Shangri-la, Mandaluyong, Hillcrest, Dolores, Cubao bank no. 2 and New Teresa. This resulted to outages in various portions of Mandaluyong, Pasig, Marikina, Taguig; parts of Quezon City including Cubao. Outages were also experienced in Cainta, Angono, Taytay, Binangonan, Antipolo, San Mateo and Montalban.
As of 11:40 p.m., Wednesday evening, power has already been restored to most of the affected areas after Meralco opted to shift load or transfer sourced power to operational substations. Only Dolores 44XM and portions of dolores 47 XM were not restored.
At 6:39 a.m. today, Meralco resorted to MLD affecting circuits served by Cubao and Marikina substations in order to ease the critical loading of Araneta-Kamuning 115 kV line. Three-hour rotating brownouts may also be implemented today during noon-peak and three hours during the evening-peak periods. Meralco, though, is doing its best to shorten the duration of the brownouts.
Posted this because sometimes, the www.meralco.com.ph site is not accessible. It would also help if the site admin would adjust the webserver/domain name so that the site can be accessed via both www.meralco.com.ph and meralco.com.ph
And if the Meralco website is not accessible? Try http://www.bulagspot.com for other brownout / Meralco-related info. Nakakatawa siya! Try nyo ang Podcast Episode #1 nya nung Nov 2008.
You can also find the Tentative Schedule of Rotational Documents online (PDF, Google docs).
The key word here is tentative, because although the schedule shows two 2-hour brownout timeslots, the actual experience has been quite longer than 2 hours.
(Got the info about the rotational brownout schedule from @jimayson.)