140,000 without power across Victoria

More than 140,000 Victorian electricity customers have been without power this afternoon, due to a shortage of supply on the national grid.

National regulator NEMCO has told the power companies to start load-shedding and they are now taking customers off supply for two hours at a time, to lighten the load.

At one stage, 58,000 Powercor customers in areas including Geelong north, Bendigo, Shepparton, Castlemaine and Werribee were offline, but that figure has now dropped back to 13,000.