Power utility issues sincere regret for unannounced outages affecting 2.1 million homes, releases fourteen-point communications improvement plan on day of next unannounced outage

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

ORTIGAS CENTER, PASIG CITY — Manila Electric Company issued a formal apology Tuesday for last week’s unannounced brownout affecting 2.1 million customers across nine Metro Manila cities, committing to a fourteen-point communications improvement framework that would ensure affected customers receive at least four hours’ notice before future scheduled outages, a promise the company fulfilled on its first test by distributing the fourteen-point framework on the same morning it implemented another unannounced outage affecting 1.8 million customers in seven cities, a communications coincidence that MERALCO’s spokesperson described as “unfortunate timing” and customers described using terms that were less architectural.

The Original Outage

The brownout that triggered the apology lasted between three and eleven hours depending on location, occurred without advance notice, and affected customers during a period of 34-degree heat that prompted the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration to issue a heat index advisory. MERALCO attributed the outage to “an unexpected transmission constraint in a critical grid segment” compounded by “demand levels that exceeded revised forecast parameters,” a description that energy analysts said translated in practice to “we knew this was coming and did not tell you.”

The formal apology, released as a press statement and social media post, expressed MERALCO’s “deepest regrets” and acknowledged that advance communication would have allowed customers to “make necessary preparations,” a phrase that in the context of 34-degree heat and medical equipment dependencies was doing significant humanitarian weight for three words.

The Fourteen-Point Framework

The communications improvement framework committed MERALCO to, among other measures: four-hour advance SMS notification to all registered customers in affected areas, enhanced social media posting protocols, direct coordination with LGU public information offices, a dedicated brownout information hotline operating twenty-four hours, and what point eleven described as “a culture of proactive customer communication at all operational levels.”

The framework document is thorough, professionally formatted, and eleven pages long. It was released at 8:47 a.m. on Tuesday. The unannounced brownout affecting 1.8 million customers began at 9:14 a.m. on Tuesday. The four-hour advance SMS notification system was, according to a MERALCO technical team statement released at 2:00 p.m., “in the process of being activated” at the time the outage began, a timeline the company described as “an implementation sequencing challenge” rather than “irony in its purest industrial form.”

“We acknowledge that the timing of Tuesday’s supply interruption in relation to Tuesday’s communications framework release creates an optics challenge,” said MERALCO spokesperson Atty. Patricia Dizon-Legaspi. “We want to assure customers that the framework is real, the commitments are genuine, and the implementation is actively proceeding. The optics challenge does not reflect the sincerity of the commitments. It reflects the operational reality that infrastructure systems do not wait for communications frameworks to be fully deployed before experiencing stress events.”

Regulatory Response

The Energy Regulatory Commission said it was “aware of the situation” and was “reviewing MERALCO’s compliance with notification requirements,” a statement it also issued after the previous four significant brownouts, following which it issued compliance notices that MERALCO acknowledged, committed to addressing, and filed response papers to, all of which are available in a 400-page public record that chronicles a conversation about customer notification that has been ongoing, without apparent resolution, since 2018.

Consumer groups including the Philstar-cited Alliance for Consumer Welfare said the pattern demonstrated that apologies and frameworks had replaced actual operational improvement as MERALCO’s primary response mechanism, and requested that the ERC require the company to demonstrate communications system functionality under testing conditions before accepting any further framework documents as evidence of corrective action.

The Human Cost

In Sampaloc, 64-year-old retiree Leticia Buenaventura-Santos said she had lost P3,200 in spoiled refrigerated food during last week’s outage and another P800 this Tuesday, and that she had received neither advance notice nor any communication from MERALCO beyond the automated text message she received forty minutes after power was restored, which thanked her for her patience.

“I do not want thanks for my patience,” she said. “I want my ice cream back. I want my medications kept cold. I want four hours of notice so I can take my mother to her sister’s house where they have a generator. I do not think this is complicated to want.”

MERALCO confirmed that a fifteen-point revised communications improvement framework incorporating learnings from Tuesday’s implementation challenge would be released by the end of the week.

The Senate Committee on Energy has been conducting oversight hearings on MERALCO’s brownout management practices for approximately eighteen months, during which Commissioner representatives have appeared at eleven hearings, submitted documentation at seven, provided complete documentation as requested at two, and at three hearings provided documentation that senators described as “responsive to questions we did not ask.” Committee Chair Senator Ana Cruz-Bautista said she intended to call a special hearing specifically on the communications framework implementation failure and expected it to produce “the same quality of answers we have been getting, but this time with a fourteen-point framework as a prop.” MERALCO said it looked forward to the hearing as an opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to the transparency principles outlined in its communications improvement program, and would be happy to distribute updated framework documentation to attending senators.

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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/meralco-apology-brownout-communications-framework-same-day-outage/