The Department of Energy reported that 61 electric cooperatives nationwide experienced 201 interruptions with an average of 70 minutes during today’s local and national elections.
Data from the DOE-led Energy Task Force Election (EFTE) showed that 111 out of the total 121 ECs submitted status reports.
According to the DOE, five distribution utilities experienced a total of seven interruptions.
Despite this, DOE assured the public that there is sufficient power supply and all transmission facilities are currently operating normally.
“We continue to work closely with the rest of the Energy family in monitoring and addressing energy concerns,” Energy Secretary Alfonso G. Cusi said.
He said the areas that have experienced sudden brownouts are at the local level.
“We at the DOE immediately spoke with the focal persons of the concerned distribution utilities (DUs) and electric cooperatives (ECs) who immediately addressed the situation,” Cusi said
Except for local and isolated cases, the duration of most interruptions were brief, as they were urgently acted upon by the ECs and DUs.
The ETFE also reported that the power disturbances were not caused by supply issues, but were due to factors such as system failure.
“We would also like to inform everyone that in the event of a loss of power in a precinct, the batteries of the vote counting machines are able to last for 10 to 12 hours. This battery span ensures that the counting of votes remain uninterrupted while the DUs and ECs do their restoration work,” he said.
For its part, Meralco recorded 20 outage incidents, most of which were isolated troubles. These were immediately addressed and restored accordingly.
As of 12 noon, power has been fully restored in all affected areas.