The Manila Electric Company (Meralco) said that the series of rotating brownouts will continue even though three of its substations that conked out last Thursday (Hillcrest, SM Shangri-La, and Mandaluyong) were all restored at 1:18 a.m. Friday after repairs were completed.

Dina Lomotan, senior superintendent for External Communication of Meralco, said that the areas hit by the brownout Wednesday night will experience four-hour brownouts twice a day. In between power interruptions, Meralco customers have electricity for four hours to allow them to do the chores requiring electricity.

However, as of this writing, the damaged transformer bank of Dolores Substation in Taytay, Rizal, owned and operated by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP), formerly Transco, remains out of service.

But the NGCP hopes to get power back by Sunday and expects rotating brownouts to ease due to lower power demand during the weekend.

In a statement, NGCP said it has been working round-the-clock and will continue to do so over the weekend until power is normalized on the three remaining transformers in Dolores Sub-station.

At least two operational transformer units in Dolores Sub-station are needed to ease the brownouts. NGCP said it is using all its resources to restore two transformers between yesterday and Sunday even as the intermittent rainy weather continues to threaten the schedule of repair works.

“NGCP engineers and technicians are working with utmost care to prevent moisture from seeping into transformer,” the firm said.

Lomotan said Meralco, with the help of NGCP, is conducting repairs on the Dolores Sub-station to prevent a system-wide blackout.

She announced though that Pasig City, which experienced 11 hours of brownout last Thursday, will no longer experience power failure.

It was recalled that Meralco started rotating power outages since Thursday following a power interruption caused by the transmission trouble at the NGCP’s Dolores substation the other night.

The transmission trouble at the Dolores Sub-station affected 13 other substations, namely; Manggahan, Parang, Marikina, Masinag, St. Anthony, Shangri-la, Santolan, Cainta, Mandaluyong, Hillcrest, Cubao Bank No. 2, and New Teresa.

Since this has not been resolved yet, Meralco said rotating power interruptions will still be implemented in several affected areas, including the eastern part of the franchise and Rizal.

“These will be implemented twice a day. The manual load dropping for today began at 8 a.m.,” said Meralco adding that it has already sent crews to Dolores Sub-station to help NGCP in the evaluation and restoration of the damaged power transformer.

Meralco said that given the limited supply of power it is receiving at the moment, is doing its best to manage the distribution of power to be able to reduce the duration of power outages.