Meralco beefs up storm troopers

By Maria Romero – September 20, 2021 12:17 AM
from Daily Tribune

Dominant power distributor Manila Electric Company (Meralco) further strengthened its network to guarantee a faster and more efficient response to any weather disturbance in its franchise area.

“We heavily invested in our facilities — strengthening it, making sure that we can withstand any bad weather,” Meralco vice president and Head of Communications Joe Zaldarriaga told the Daily Tribune.

“Over the years, we are able to improve our restoration time, which cut the time of power interruption after a calamity. We also addressed the so-called interruption frequency rate and multi-interruption time,” he added.

Zaldarriaga also noted that Meralco has strategically mobilized its crew in the affected areas, which resulted in faster power restoration.

“We are located in the typhoon belt, yearly at least 20 typhoons enter the country. We are affected so we make sure that we are always prepared,” he said.

Jolina caused outages

During the onslaught of typhoon “Jolina,” Meralco reported that about 270,000 customers — mostly from the provinces of Batangas, Laguna and Cavite — were affected as power outages hit the southern part of its franchise area.

The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines also noted that earlier, about 500,000 customers were affected by an automatic load dropping (ALD) when 730 megawatts of capacity from three plants were isolated due to the tripping of its Batangas-Makban line.

The ALD, which is a procedure implemented when power is cut off due to a thin supply, only lasted for 11 minutes.