Electricity went out for about 75,000 Hawaiian Electric customers in pockets of Central, West and Windward Oahu late this morning but now been restored, a Hawaiian Electric Co. official said.

HECO implemented the temporary outages as a precautionary measure after a 180-megawatt generating station owned by independent power provider AES went down at about 10:30 a.m., HECO spokesman Darren Pai said.

“It was a precautionary measure to prevent potential damage to the system and it’s part of an automatic process that’s built into the way the system is operated,” he said. The action helps rebalance the supply and demand for power on the grid and prevent a potentially larger and longer outage.

The AES unit, at Campbell Industrial Park, is the largest power generating station on Oahu, Pai said. It was supplying 23 percent of Oahu’s power at the time it went down.

Power was restored to most customers by 11:09 a.m., except for a few customers who had their electricity restored shortly afterward, Pai said.