MANILA (UPDATE) - Meralco on Wednesday blamed "overloading" for the recent spike in reports of brownouts in its service area.

The power distributor said it normally receives 268 incidents of power interruption each day, but this increased to 732 incidents recently, even though there were no Red Alerts issued.

The localized power interruptions were due to overloading caused by the massive use of cooling devices and illegal connections, Meralco said.

"Tumaas po ng tumaas ang kunsumo nilang kuryente, yung kakaning kuryente ng kable, di na po kinaya," said Meralco distrbution manager Abe Manzanas.

(Electricity consumption kept increasing and the cables were no longer able to handle this.)

Meralco spokesman Joe Zaldarriaga says some customers have bought additional appliances particularly airconditioning units and electric fans which they all use at the same time to beat the hot weather.

Zaldarriaga explained that a transformer in an area can only accommodate a certain amount of load. When consumers use all their appliances at once, an overload occurs which will automatically stop the flow of electricity to houses resulting in a power interruption.

When asked why it takes 2-3 days to restore electricity in some areas, Zaldarriaga said that this is because of the sheer number of localized outages in its franchise area.

"Humihingi ako ng pang unawa sa ating mga kababayan dahil sa sheer volume dahil sa dami ng mga insidente. Minsan we need to prioritize yung restoration protocol," said Zaldarriaga.

(I would like to apologize to the public because of the sheer volume of incidents. Sometimes we need to prioritize the restoration protocol.)

Meralco chairman and CEO Manny Pangilinan sees the need for the utility to prepare for a similar occurrence in the future where transformers are not able to sustain higher electricity demand.

"Meralco got to take a look at its distribution network and start building more capacities with the surges that we see now, because if it happens again next year, ku-questionin na kami ng government, ng media, what are you doing to make your network more robust?" says Pangilinan.

The National Grid Corp of the Philippines has been raising alerts over the country's power grids for three weeks now amid thin power reserves.

The Department of Energy meanwhile admitted last week that the power situation has reached crisis level.