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Philippines president says energy storage has ‘vital’ infrastructure role to play

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr cuts the ribbon to inaugurate the BESS in Limay, Philippines. Image: Government of Philippines official photo.

It is “vital” that energy storage systems (ESS) are incorporated into the energy infrastructure of the Philippines, the country’s president has said.

Speaking at the inauguration of a large-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) project a few days ago, president Ferdinand Marcos Jr pointed to the technology as a solution to national energy security challenges.

In addition to energy security, storage can help the Philippines energy sector to become more sustainable and cleaner, while also making energy more affordable and creating employment opportunities, according to the politician.

“Given the increasing generation of renewable energy, it is vital then that we advance and incorporate Energy Storage Systems, or ESS, in our overall energy infrastructure,” Marcos said.

The president took part in the unveiling of a BESS project by major Philippine power company SMC Global Power, in the municipality of Limay in the Luzon island province of Bataan. The grid-scale facility is one of a combined 90MWh of BESS being built at SMC Global Power thermal power plants in the region.

That too is part of a wider buildout by the power company – it aims to complete the last of its 32 BESS projects totalling about 1,000MWh, across the country by the end of this year.

As reported by Energy-Storage.news, global energy storage system integrators ABB, Fluence and Wärtsilä were appointed to work on the portfolio under engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contracts, while Samsung supplied battery modules.

Filipino power generation and utility companies like SMC Global Power are locked in something of an arms race to deploy batteries at their power plants, DNV energy storage lead for the Asia-Pacific region George Garabandic said in a recent interview.

Speaking to our quarterly journal PV Tech Power (vol.33), Garabandic said that power plant operators in the Southeast Asian country are responsible for delivering ancillary services, such as frequency response, to balance the grid. Unlike thermal power plants running on gas, coal or other fossil fuels, batteries have microsecond response times.

They also don’t require fuel, which has fluctuating supplies and costs, or as much time or money spent on maintenance. In other words, they can increase the operational efficiency of ancillary services delivery and generate cost savings, Garabandic said.

Garanbandic’s team recently worked on testing and certifying the Southeast Asian region’s largest BESS project to date, a 200MW/285MWh system in Singapore, which came online just six months after project developer Sembcorp was awarded the contract by the national Energy Market Authority (EMA).

Battery storage can help ‘avert power crisis’ in Philippines

SMC Global Power is part of the Philippines conglomerate San Miguel Corporation (SMC). Marcos said the 1,000MWh portfolio will make it one of the world’s largest grid-scale battery system operators. The BESS technology also supports a national goal of sourcing 35% of its total energy requirement from renewable energy by 2035.

“Our BESS facilities will support the country’s power grid by storing excess power from existing plants, and injecting this power back, when and where it is needed, within milliseconds – ensuring power quality is stable, and reaches users all over the country,” SMC president and CEO Raymond Ang said at the inauguration event.

Ang claimed the SMC Global Power BESS network will be largely to thank for the Philippines grids being able to integrate up to an estimated 5,000MW of renewable power.

“With battery energy storage, we can solve the problem with most renewable energy sources, which is intermittence, due to the irregularity or seasonality of solar and wind power sources,” Ang said.

The CEO also noted that the government is “working to avert a power crisis,” but that getting new generation facilities online will take time. The BESS network meanwhile is “is already here, and it can provide immediate mitigation to the power crisis,” according to Ang.

Image: SMC Global Power.

SMC was actually responsible for the country’s first-ever large-scale BESS, a 10MWh system at a power station in the municipality of Masinloc, also in Luzon, back in 2016. The company is set on expanding its rapidly-growing fleet further: of a further 2,000MW of BESS projects to have won approval from the national Board of Investments, SMC Global Power projects account for about 95%.

Earlier this year, the Philippines Department of Energy (DOE) published a set of proposed changes to rules and regulations that it hopes will ease the integration of energy storage into energy markets.

President Marcos commented at the Limay ribbon-cutting that the current rules and legislation need to catch up with technology developments, adding that his administration would extend all support mechanisms to create a mutually beneficial partnership between investors in energy storage and renewable energy, and the country.

“We will improve the policy and regulatory framework for the renewable energy (RE) industry, especially for the ESS technology, to encourage the further development of our fledgling renewables industry.”

“We will streamline and harmonise the regulatory framework, at the national and local levels, to ensure ease of doing business, to take down unnecessary regulatory burdens, and this is all part of our agenda to improve bureaucratic efficiency and sound fiscal management for a much better, more streamlined, more efficient system,” Marcos said.

The country is already the SouthEast Asian leader in battery storage, with BloombergNEF finding that more than 80% of energy storage installations in the region in 2022 were in the Philippines.

Energy-Storage.news’ publisher Solar Media will host the 1st Energy Storage Summit Asia, 11-12 July 2023 in Singapore. The event will help give clarity on this nascent, yet quickly growing market, bringing together a community of credible independent generators, policymakers, banks, funds, off-takers and technology providers. For more information, go to the website.

Australia’s residential energy storage market grew 55% in 2022

Then-state premier Steven Marshall speaks at the 2018 opening of a factory in South Australia by home ESS maker Sonnen. The state accounted for 27% of market volume in 2022 and leads in per-household installations. Image: Sonnen.

The Australian market for residential battery storage grew by an estimated 55% in 2022 from the previous year, according to solar market consultancy SunWiz.

The company’s latest annual report on the battery storage market in Australia also found that about 15% of new solar PV installations are being combined with home storage, an increase from around 10% in 2021.

In all, an estimated 47,100 systems were deployed last year equivalent to about 589MWh capacity, with the market now at around 180,000 cumulative installations adding up to about 1,920MWh of capacity installed since 2015. In last year’s edition, SunWiz totted up an estimate of 333MWh of installations during 2021, as reported by Energy-Storage.news at the time.

The average residential storage battery system capacity is 12.5kWh, and in most of the country, payback on investment can be achieved in 10 years or less, with payback in eight years in some states.

While there are therefore some key differences in market dynamics from state to state, for example in state-level incentive programmes and how they are structured, SunWiz found that every Australian state and territory saw “significant growth” in battery installations in 2022.

Indeed, 2022 was a year that saw installation records smashed in every state except South Australia, partly due to that state already having a head-start that makes it the leader in per-household uptake of storage.

Australians are certainly environmentally aware and climate-focused as a society, evidenced by the high uptake of rooftop solar many parts of the country have seen for years. More recently though, the economic drivers for solar PV with batteries have become too good to ignore for many members of the public.

“Skyrocketing” electricity prices from utilities mean that Australian homes and businesses are “taking back power from the energy system by turning to cheaper, renewable sources of energy,” SunWiz managing director Warwick Johnston said, with solar-plus-storage guaranteeing energy bill savings.

“Australians responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, COVID, the energy price crisis, and worsening climate fuelled disasters by installing home solar systems linked to batteries, in an effort to increase their energy independence, resilience and self-reliance,” in 2022, according to Johnston.

The results are even more striking when considering that the number of PV installations in Australia fell year-on-year, in contrast to considerable growth in energy storage system (ESS) installations, the result of both the rising cost of electricity and a trend towards self-sufficiency and resiliency that SunWiz acknowledged is an international one.

Battery-only installations comprised a very small share of the overall market, whereas a quarter of distributed ESS system installs were retrofits at existing PV installations, and 55% were installed concurrently with new PV system.

States with strong incentive and subsidy programmes, including South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and Victoria had the highest attachment rates of battery storage with new PV systems. Meanwhile New South Wales remains the state with the most behind-the-meter ESS installs, about 55,000 of the national total, with Victoria the next with 44,284 installations estimated by SunWiz from compiling and analysing various data sources including government registers. Overall, Victoria and New South Wales each accounted for 27% of national market volume in 2022, SunWiz found.

However, battery storage hasn’t quite gone mainstream just yet in the way that residential PV has: taking into account the number of existing PV systems in the country as well as the total number of dwellings versus the number of home batteries installed showed that market penetration remains low, at between 1.6% to 5.3% of the total addressable market size. In some parts of Australia, around one in four or one in three homes have solar.

That implies that residential energy storage is largely the domain of the ‘early adopters’, rather than the mainstream, but the growth seen does at least mark a transition away from the ‘innovators’ who go before even the early adopters in what might be called the technology acceptance timeline.

Conger Solar Systems to Design Solar Canopies for Project Nexus

A Conger solar system built over a canal

Conger Solar Systems says it is designing and engineering the solar panel canopies that will be used to cover various sections of Turlock Irrigation District’s canals for Project Nexus in California.

Conger’s structures were commissioned by Project Nexus managers Solar AquaGrid and the Turlock Irrigation District based on the firm’s successful solar-over-canal deployments in India.

Conger’s designs are well-suited for covering narrow and wide-span canals and the challenges posed by building over existing utility corridors while saving open land for other purposes in the process.

“After teaching an environmental design course with Buckminster Fuller at John Denver’s Windstar Foundation, I realized that the inherent efficiency of cable structures, combined with solar energy was an embodiment of Bucky’s core principles of sustainability, renewable energy, and doing more with less,” says Steven Conger, CTO/Chairman, Conger Solar Systems.

Once design concepts were patented, Conger Solar Systems designed and built its first tensioned cable solar structure over a parking lot in Los Angeles in 2011. Several projects followed, mainly in India, paving the way to the Punjab, India solar-over-canal project Conger Solar Systems designed in 2017.

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Ferrovial Building Floating Solar PV Plant for Utility

A Ferrovial PV project

Spanish water utility Canal de Isabel II has awarded an engineering, construction and commissioning contract to Ferrovial, an infrastructure developer, for a 1.7 MW floating solar plant in Torrelaguna, Madrid.

The contract is the first in Canal de Isabel II’s solar plan, an initiative promoting the generation and self-consumption of renewable energies, and represents an investment of $48.9 million.

The infrastructure will be installed during the first months of 2023 on the lower reservoir of the Santa Lucía Hydroelectric Power Plant in Torrelaguna, Madrid. It will generate more than 2,000 MWh of clean energy. The facility will also reduce the evaporation of water from the reservoir.Ferrovial launched the energy solutions division within its construction department to help carry out the Horizon 24 Plan. The plan outlines collaboration with solar and wind power plant development, energy transmission and distribution projects, and energy services.

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Solar-powered ‘sand-based battery’ thermal energy storage project underway in Italy

Presentation of Magaldi MGTES unit at the event in Salerno, Italy. Image: Enel X / Magaldi Group

Partners Enel X and Magaldi Group have begun construction in Salerno, Italy, on a 13MWh thermal energy storage (TES) plant based on a patented technology.

Called Magaldi Green Thermal Energy Storage (MGTES), the storage tech was developed by ultra-high temperature material handling company Magaldi and utilises a fluidised sand bed to store heat, which is then released as steam at temperatures between 120-400°C.

Aimed at helping to decarbonise industrial processes that require heat, the technology was described as the “first worldwide patented sand-based battery” to store energy as high-temperature steam.

The first 125-tonne installation will be powered by a 5MW solar PV array and is being deployed for IGI, a food company based in the Salerno province of Buccino.

Enel X, the digital, smart energy and energy efficiency arm of Enel Group, has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Magaldi Group’s Magaldi Power subsidiary to find suitable sites and begin deploying MGTES systems in Italy.

MGTES can “ensure high levels of efficiency” in industrial processes that require high temperatures, Enel X CEO Francesco Venturini said, noting that the Italy-developed technology is backed by an Italian supply chain, while claiming opportunities for it will be found outside Italy too.

It can be a drop-in replacement for burning gas for various industrial applications, according to Magaldi Group president Mario Magaldi.

“Italy has the resources and know-how required to play a prominent role in the battery industry for energy storage, which is instrumental in producing renewable energy on a continuous basis, and in this way will help make the whole system stable and safe,” Magaldi said.

The 13MWh system is scheduled to come online in the second half of 2024, covering about 20% of IGI’s energy consumption and making renewable energy available to it around the clock.

Sand-based energy storage was in the news recently with the inauguration of an 8MWh project in Finland that stores heated sand in a cylindrical tower to be used for district heating, through tech startup Polar Night Energy.

Brenmiller to have thermal storage ‘gigafactory’ this year

Elsewhere, and further down the road to commercialisation, Israel-headquartered Brenmiller Energy said it will reach 4,000MWh annual production capacity of its TES modules by the end of this year.

The thermal storage specialist is listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. Its technology uses electricity and waste heat to heat crushed rocks to high temperatures, storing it for later use including long-duration energy storage (LDES) and multi-day applications. Like MGTES, the stored heat is outputted as steam, which can be used as heat, or drive turbines to generate electricity.

Brenmiller in fact inaugurated a 24MWh project in Italy last November with Enel X parent company Enel Group, at a power station in Tuscany.

Called bGen, the Brenmiller modules are going to be made at a factory site in Dimona, Israel. The factory is set to begin production in May and Brenmiller said key equipment has recently arrived, financed through a non-dilutive credit facility worth €7.5 million (US$8.17 million) with the European Investment Bank (EIB).

The TES technology is like Magaldi Group’s sand battery aimed at industrial processes, but also power generation applications, with Brenmiller touting that it can be fully powered by forms of energy including waste heat and biomass.

“We believe Brenmiller is on track for another TES industry first—that, by the end of 2023, it will become one of the first global TES companies with an operational TES production facility that will enable it to service the growing market demand.

“The impending completion of our production facility is well timed, as we expect to increase commercial orders based on our current project pipeline and the completion of pilot projects now underway,” Brenmiller Energy president and CEO Avi Brenmiller said.

Nearly half of all global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions come from heat processes, making the need to decarbonise both an urgent challenge and a major opportunity that energy storage technologies can help tackle. A report last year from the Long-Duration Energy Storage Council (LDES Council) analysed and outlined the size of the addressable market for thermal storage, measured in terawatts of energy and billions of dollars.

Macquarie’s Green Investment Group, Shell to develop 400MWh BESS in Melbourne

Shell Energy trades power from the 100MW Minety BESS (pictured), which is in England. Image: Shell Energy Europe.

Green Investment Group (GIG) and Shell Energy have announced a 200MW/400MWh battery storage project in Victoria, Australia.

GIG, which is owned by Macquarie Asset Management, and Shell Energy, the integrated energy services subsidiary of the fossil fuel major, will co-develop the project at Rangebank Business Park in the city of Cranbourne, southeast Melbourne.

Financial close has already been reached, clearing the partners to begin execution of the project, for an expected commissioning date in late 2024.

The battery energy storage system (BESS) equipment will be supplied by Fluence, using the company’s sixth generation Gridstack modular BESS solution. Fluence will build, service and maintain the asset.

The region of Melbourne it is being developed in is experiencing fast growth in population, with a corresponding increase in demand for electricity and the BESS will help to stabilise electricity supply in the state of Victoria “by providing additional storage capacity which can be discharged at times of peak demand,” Shell Energy Australia CEO Greg Joiner said.

Shell Energy has signed an offtake deal with a 20-year term for 100% of dispatch rights to the BESS. CEO Joiner noted that the Rangebank BESS project marks the company’s first direct equity investment into a BESS project anywhere in the world, as well as being its first investment in a project of this type in Victoria.

Shell Energy’s activities in Australia include supplying electricity to commercial and industrial (C&I) customers as well as project engineering and other services. Its website lists numerous applications in the business case for battery storage, including frequency control ancillary services (FCAS) markets, demand response, reliability and energy reserve trading, arbitrage and a suite of behind-the-meter services like solar load shaping and demand charge management.

Meanwhile, equity investment from Green Investment Group in the project will transfer to Eku Energy, the battery energy storage platform the company set up last year. At the time of its launch, GIG said Eku Energy would develop, build and manage assets across a wide range of markets, revenue sources and market structures.

As reported by Energy-Storage.news last November, the platform kicked off by continuing two GIG portfolio projects: a 40MW/40MWh project in England and a 150MW/150MWh project at a former coal power plant site in Victoria, the latter co-funded privately by GIG and Engie, with Fluence the technology provider in that instance too.

Other BESS projects for Shell Energy in Australia include two 500MW/1,000MWh facilities in development in New South Wales, one co-developed with AMPYR Energy in Wellington, Central West NSW, the other at another former coal power plant site near the town of Lithgow, with Shell holding full development rights. The company also has a 100MW/200MWh offtake deal and partnership signed in 2021 with utility Edify Energy from a 300MWh portfolio of projects, also in New South Wales.

Canada’s budget includes energy storage tax credit in wave of cleantech investment

The majority of BESS deployed in Canada to date has been large behind-the-meter C&I systems in Ontario like the one pictured, but this could be set to change. Credit: PRNewsfoto/Convergent Energy + Power

Canada will introduce tax credit incentives and invest in developing and manufacturing solar PV, energy storage and other renewable energy technologies in an Inflation Reduction Act-style scheme.

The Government of Canada has released its 2023 budget, which positions growing the clean economy as one of its core priorities, alongside healthcare and ‘affordability’. Under the budget, the government has confirmed the 30% refundable tax credit on investments made by taxable entities into clean energy technologies like solar, battery storage and wind. This builds on its first announcement in the Fall Economic Statement 2022 plan, which was covered on EnergyStorage.news.

A 15% refundable tax credit for investments into clean electricity generation and energy storage by non-taxable entities – like indigenous communities and municipally-owned utilities – was announced as well.

It also proposes to introduce a 30% refundable tax credit for clean technology manufacturing, applying to investments into machinery and equipment used for manufacturing processes as well as extracting, processing and recycling critical materials to clean supply chains.

The US’ landmark IRA, which set aside huge credits for energy transition investment, has seen others like the EU – and now Canada – trying to follow suit and remain competitive. Details of the scheme are yet to be clarified.

To read the full version of this story including further details of the fiscal budget, go to PV Tech.

Fluence launches ‘Ultrastack’ BESS solution aimed at storage-as-transmission applications

Fluence has long touted the potential of storage for the transmission network. Pictured is a promotional rendering for the launch of its sixth generation BESS solution a couple of years ago, but Ultrastack is its first bespoke product for the market segment. Image: Siemens.

Fluence has launched a battery storage solution aimed at the market for energy storage as a transmission asset, called ‘Ultrastack’.

The global energy storage manufacturer, system integrator and clean energy digital services provider revealed the Ultrastack yesterday.

It is designed for applications that help transmission and distribution (T&D) system entities to lower the costs of operating and upgrading their networks, with batteries used to increase utilisation of power lines, reduce the curtailment of renewable energy on the grid and reduce grid congestion.

Fluence described it as the company’s highest-performance energy storage product to date. That’s because it needs to be, according to Fluence VP of EMEA region sales and market development Brian Perusse. Grid operators have extremely tight requirements to keep their networks running safely and smoothly, often answerable directly to regulators and governments if anything goes wrong.

Essentially, storage-as-transmission, as Fluence calls it, places batteries into the category of critical grid infrastructure and that means the Ultrastack has 99% system uptime to meet expected requirements on availability, enhanced cybersecurity measures and more – taking a lot of the features and functionality of BESS equipment “to a whole new level,” Perusse said in an interview with Energy-Storage.news.

The company has patent pending for Ultrastack’s control applications, allowing it to deliver system stabilisation and utilisation services such as synthetic inertia, and power oscillation damping.

Fluence is already working on two high-profile storage-as-transmission projects in Europe: a 200MW/200MWh project with Lithuanian grid operator Litgrid, and a 250MW/250MWh so-called ‘Grid Booster’ project in Germany with transmission operator TransnetBW.

“Storage-as-transmission is starting to have a foothold in Europe,” Perusse said with regard to those projects.

“They might look like storage projects but the technical requirements are substantially different from any other storage deployed in any other markets. You have a higher availability, reliability, cybersecurity requirements, it becomes critical grid infrastructure at the transmission level, and it’s quite different in its requirements [to other projects].”

Duke Energy Begins Operation of North Carolina Battery System

Ross Campbell

Duke Energy is expanding its battery storage capabilities in North Carolina and has begun commercial operation of the state’s largest battery system, an 11 MW project in Onslow County.

The battery system will frequently be operated in conjunction with an adjacent 13 MW solar facility located on a leased site within Marine Corps Base (MCB) Camp Lejeune, which has been generating carbon-free energy since 2015. The two sites can also be operated independently.

Both projects are connected to a Duke Energy substation and will be used to serve all Duke Energy Progress customers. Future work could enable the solar and battery systems to improve the resiliency of MCB Camp Lejeune against outages.

“Integration of the solar plant with a battery energy storage system, unthinkable a decade ago, presents the installation with a number of opportunities to achieve energy resilience objectives,” says U.S. Navy Commander Ross Campbell, director, public works at MCB Camp Lejeune. “These systems are part of the ongoing collaboration with the Department of Defense and its utility providers to ensure energy security at federal facilities.”

The battery’s chemistry is lithium iron phosphate with the system rated at 11-MW/11-MWh, and its physical footprint is about 1 acre. Duke Energy partnered with Black and Veatch construction entity OCI, which acted as the prime contractor for engineering, procurement and construction.

EDP Renewables Places Module Order with First Solar

Mark Widmar

EDP Renewables has placed a multi-year order for 1.8 GW of First Solar’s advanced thin film photovoltaic solar modules. The modules, which will be delivered up to 2028, will power U.S. projects developed by EDP Renewables North America (EDPR).

EDPR is a global pure renewable energy company that operates in 28 markets around the globe.

“EDP Renewables joins a growing roster of large, sophisticated developers choosing long-term pricing and supply certainty, and responsibly produced solar modules by powering their projects with First Solar’s technology,” says Mark Widmar, chief executive officer, First Solar. “This validates the value that our customers place in our differentiation, not just in technology but our way of doing business.”

With this agreement, EDPR de-risks its solar pipeline in the U.S. by securing equipment for its expected growth in the utility and distributed generation segments. Additionally, this allows EDPR to increase its commitment to local content in the U.S., while also pursuing its strategy of supply chain and technology diversification.

The partnership between both companies started in 2019, when EDPR acquired a 50% stake in a 278 MW solar portfolio developed by First Solar.