Two consecutive days of power outages from May 13 to 14 affected more than 2 million customers of Meralco after the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) placed the Luzon grid under red and yellow alert status due to insufficient power supply.
On May 13, the NGCP declared a red alert from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. and a yellow alert from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m.
According to the NGCP, Luzon’s peak demand reached 12,537 megawatts, while available capacity stood at 12,447 megawatts. The grid operator added that a total of 4,681.6MW was unavailable to the grid.
A red alert is issued when power supply is insufficient to meet consumer demand and the transmission grid’s regulating requirements. A yellow alert, meanwhile, is declared when the operating margin is insufficient to meet the grid’s contingency requirements, the NGCP said.
As a result, the NGCP directed Meralco to implement manual load dropping (MLD), or rotational power interruptions, affecting around 1.9 million customers in Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, Metro Manila, Quezon, and Rizal. The affected customers accounted for roughly 23% of Meralco’s 8.3 million customer base as of March 2026.
The outages lasted from Wednesday afternoon to evening, with Meralco saying power services were fully restored by 12:14 a.m. on May 14.
However, on Thursday, May 14, the NGCP again placed the Luzon grid under red alert from 4 PM to 9 PM and a yellow alert from 3 PM to 4 PM and from 10 PM to 11 PM, prompting Meralco to implement another round of power interruptions.
The power distributor said the outages affected nearly 1 million customers.
“Yesterday’s (May 14) Red Alert similarly resulted in MLD that started around 3:54 p.m. and affected about 900,000 Meralco customers in portions of Batangas, Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna, Metro Manila, Pampanga, Quezon and Rizal. Services were fully restored by 11:50 p.m.,” Meralco said.
“We continue to urge our customers to practice energy efficiency measures to help manage overall demand. Rest assured that we are closely monitoring and managing the situation and will provide updates as needed,” the power distributor added.
