Image: SDG&E.

Californian investor-owned utility San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) has released its decarbonisation roadmap study, which says the state will need to quadruple its electricity capacity from 85GW in 2020 to 356GW in 2045.

“The Path to Net Zero: A Decarbonization Roadmap for California” was released yesterday (5 April) and offers recommendations designed to help meet the state’s aim of carbon neutrality by 2045.

To achieve this the state will need 40GW of battery energy storage deployment but also 20GW of dispatchable generation from green hydrogen, the utility added. Some 2,728MW of storage is grid-connected as per California ISO’s (CAISO’s) most recent monthly statistics for March, but there is no generation from green hydrogen.

The report, available on its website, says that alongside electrification of sectors like transportation and buildings, electric reliability is also important part of the green transition. The press release claims SDG&E’s report is the first to incorporate the utility industry standard for reliability, which means only one power outage every 10 years.

Boston Consulting Group, Black & Veatch and UC San Diego Professor David G. Victor provided technical support to SDG&E for conducting the study.

California needs to decarbonise 4.5x as fast as it has been doing over the past decade to achieve its goals, SDG&E said. Electric generation capacity needs to quadruple from the 2020 figure of 85GW to 356GW in 2045, half of which will be solar.

The figure differs slightly to California ISO’s own recent figures which said it needs 37GW of battery energy storage systems and 4GW of long-duration storage by 2045 to achieve its goals. Other, older figures have pegged the long duration capacity alone needed by then at 55GW.

However, only 2.5GW of that energy storage will be in SDG&E’s service area with an interim 2030 target of 1.5GW. By the end of 2020, the figure stood at 331MW, both utility-owned and third-party.

SDG&E and CAISO figures on the necessary storage deployment for 2045 both equate to storage providing over 10% of power capacity the state will need by then according to SDG&E (356GW).

SDG&E estimates that demand for green hydrogen in California will reach 6.5 million metric tons by 2045, 80% of which will be used to enhance the reliability of electricity supply.

The report also says that significant investments in the region’s electricity infrastructure will be needed to support the higher electricity capacity. In its modelling, California will be importing 34GW of renewable power from other states and that a larger interconnected western grid is critical to ensure the long-term reliability of California’s electricity system.

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The project will have 400MW of solar power. Image: ReNew Power.

Japanese conglomerate Mitsui & Co. has invested in a 1,300MW wind-plus-solar-plus-storage project development in India.

Mitsui’s investment in the project by ReNew, an Indian renewable energy company, comes six months after the government-owned Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) signed a round-the-clock (RTC) power purchase agreement (PPA) to procure 400MW from its multiple sites.

The multi-state project will have a total of 1,300MW of renewable energy from three wind farms totalling 900MW, solar PV totalling 400MW and a battery energy storage system (BESS) up to 100MWh in capacity. It will be spread across Rajasthan, Karnataka, and Maharashtra, all on the west side of the country.

ReNew is doing the EPC, O&M, and project management for the project which will start operating commercially in Q3 2023. The 25-year PPA with SECI was signed at ₹2.90/kWh (3.8 US cents), which will grow 3% a year for the first 15 years before remaining stable for the remaining 10 years of the PPA.

The project is expected to cost around US$1.2 billion and is designed to operate at an 80% average annual plant load factor (PLF) with a minimum capacity utilisation of 70% a month.

Mr. Sumant Sinha, Founder, Chairman and CEO of ReNew Power said: “The RTC project, the first of its kind in India, provides the lowest cost and emission-free 24 X 7 renewable electricity. We are proud to partner with Mitsui, a leading global conglomerate, to support India’s green energy transition and look forward to strengthening this partnership in the future.”

ReNew is one of the largest renewable energy Independent Power Producers (IPPs) in India and globally, it claims. It develops, builds, owns, and operates utility-scale wind, solar and hydro energy projects and has a total portfolio of 10.2 GW of renewable energy projects across India as of February 2022.

It recently signed a joint venture (JV) agreement with global system integrator Fluence to deliver energy storage solutions in India.

The energy storage market is set to grow substantially in the coming years at both the upsteam and downstream levels. The Central Electricity Authority reckons it needs 28GW of energy storage to reach its 2030 decarbonisation goals while the government recently awarded funds to projects building battery manufacturing capacity totalling 50GWh.

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Image: Eos Energy Enterprises via Facebook.

Zinc battery energy storage system provider Eos Energy Enterprises finished 2021 with an order backlog of US$148.7 million and a net loss for the year of US$124.2 million.

The company booked revenue of US$4.6 million for the year and expects that to grow ten-fold to US$50 million in 2022, just from its existing orders backlog, nearly a quarter of which it says is future recurring services revenue. It reckons it will reach profitability by H2 2023.

Its total costs over 2021 were US$139.3 million and it finished the year with US$105.7 million in cash or cash equivalents. The company claims an opportunity pipeline of US$4 billion and aims to capitalise on 10% of that, in new orders, this year.

Eos Energy is one of those expanding US-based battery manufacturing capacity. It will invest US$25 million in expanding its Turtle Creek manufacturing facility in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to 800MWh. Manufacturing first time yield is approaching 90%, it added.

The Department of Energy recently invited the company to apply for a loan to support the expansion of the facility. Some US$10 billion of loans are in process for battery manufacturing projects in the US, the DoE says.

The company is one of several long-duration energy storage providers to have listed in the US at a relatively early storage of commercialisation, going public via a SPAC merger in November 2020 shortly after it struck long-term agreements to supply 1.5GW of its battery systems in the US. It has also received orders from India.

Its market cap sits at US$211 million at the time of writing, with an enterprise value around US$220 million.

Eos Energy Enterprises’ technology

The company’s batteries have a duration of up to three hours but can be stacked to create up to 12 hours of discharge potential.

Eos Energy’s technology employs a zinc-halide oxidation/reduction cycle packaged in a sealed, flooded, bipolar battery. It says the battery technology offers a safe, scalable, fully recyclable and sustainable alternative to lithium-ion and requires just five core commodity materials “derived from non-rare earth and non-conflict minerals that are abundantly available and fully recyclable”. The battery is non-flammable.

The company says its storage system’s use cases include peak shifting and demand management. It claims its battery use 100% depth of discharge without increased degradation while lithium-ion uses tends to need to limit this to 80-90% due to the impact of accelerating on its degradation rates. It says its battery’s degradation rate at 100% is lower than lithium-ion’s at 80%.

Another benefit it claims is low maintenance and minimum auxiliary load, with no need for a HVAC or fire suppression system meaning lower costs. Other uses cases are integrating solar and wind generation and providing ancillary services to the grid.

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Image: Andy Colthorpe / Solar Media.

A 214 acre site which will host a battery cell gigafactory in Arizona, US, has been acquired by KORE Power.

The company’s CEO told Energy-Storage.news that with the construction of the 12GWh annual production capacity facility adding to a ramp up of its existing factory in China, KORE Power will have 18GWh of total production capacity by the end of 2024. 

The US-headquartered battery cell manufacturer is targeting both electric vehicle (EV) and energy storage system (ESS) markets. It currently produces both lithium iron phosphate (LFP) and nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) cells from a factory in China and assembles ESS solutions with its partners. 

Having signalled its intent early on to establish manufacturing capabilities in its homeland, in July 2021 KORE Power said it had selected the site in Buckeye in Arizona’s Maricopa County.

Added to the increase in capacity of its China factory from 2GWh to 6GWh, CEO Lindsay Gorrill told Energy-Storage.news in an interview that the company is “only a couple of years away” from having 18GWh of annual capacity available to transport and stationary energy storage market customers. 

An expected date for getting the Buckeye plant operational in Q2 2023 has been pushed back to 2024, but this has come with an increase of its planned size from 1 million square feet to 2 million, with construction expected to begin this summer. The plant, dubbed the KOREPlex, will be part of the City of Buckeye’s planned ‘Sustainable Valley,’ to which it hopes to attract companies working in the full clean energy and cleantech ecosystem. 

“What’s critical is that all of the market, all the big guys, are focused on EVs, which is huge [as an opportunity], but if you don’t build enough of the stuff that supports the grid, the EV side will never work because they can’t produce a million EVs and not change the grid. We made a conscious effort to be in both markets [EV and ESS],” Gorrill said. 

KORE Power wants to have a net zero manufacturing facility, and this was behind part of the decision to choose the site it has in Arizona, where there won’t be “anything on top of the roof except solar panels”.

“The idea is that we’re gonna create enough energy with solar and our own storage that we’re building to run the plant and create extra energy for the grid,” Gorrill said, adding that tie-ups with recycling companies will be made to add a circular, holistic value chain around the company’s production. 

KORE Power is targeting a high level of vertical integration, having recently acquired an ESS system integrator, Northern Reliability (NRI), to form a new business division, KORE Solutions, which will be the company’s own system integrator arm. It signed a deal in January with NOVONIX, a supplier of graphite anodes, which is investing into KORE Power and becoming its exclusive supplier of the vital material. 

While the US is now racing to catch up with China, South Korea, Japan and to a lesser extent Europe in establishing manufacturing of lithium batteries, practically none of the committed new capacity additions are known to be specifically for ESS.

In addition to the fact that nearly all of the US-made cells and packs are likely to be serving the EV industry first and foremost, KORE Power is also an extremely rare example of a US-headquartered or owned battery maker, besides Tesla, to be building gigawatt-scale manufacturing. 

Recently, a startup called American Battery Factory (ABF) said it wants to establish LFP cell production in the US that could target the ESS market, with its CEO claiming in an interview that a 3GWh site could be up and running within two years. ABF wants to establish a “network” of factories, CEO Paul Charles told this site in March.

Also announced in the past few weeks was a gigafactory in West Virginia which will serve the stationary energy storage market, from another US startup, called SPARKZ. SPARKZ will make cobalt-free, solid state lithium batteries using technology that it has developed from the factory, the expected size or production capacity of which is yet to be disclosed.

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Part of a 1MW/6MWh project using NGK’s NAS batteries for utility BC Hydro in Canada, which went online in 2013. Image: BC Hydro.

Technologies from US vehicle-to-grid (V2G) solutions company Nuvve and NGK’s sodium sulfur (NAS) batteries will provide ancillary services and other grid stability applications in Japan. 

Japan’s grid-balancing market is not widely open to participation from batteries today, with regional power companies effectively responsible for keeping their grids stabilised and keeping the frequency regulated — at 50Hz in eastern and northern Japan and at 50Hz in the west and southern parts of the country. 

However, in partnership with Chubu Electric Power Miraiz, the electricity retail and demand response aggregation spinoff of one of those regional power companies, Chubu Electric Power, and Toyota Group’s trading arm Toyota Tsusho, California-headquartered Nuvve took part in a demonstration to prove that its V2G tech can be used effectively to deliver safe and stable power to the grid inexpensively. 

Nuvve’s control system, which can interface with different types of electric vehicle (EV), effectively controlled the dispatch and charging of EV batteries, aggregated together to form a virtual power plant (VPP). 

Meanwhile, Chubu Electric Power Miraiz also trialled the use of Japanese company NGK Insulators’ NAS battery technology. The larger scale battery systems, which have been used in grid applications around the world, ranged from 14MWh to 17MWh and were also aggregated into the VPP. 

Nuvve said the control and dispatch of EV batteries was delivered with the required precision and fast response times, using the company’s platform, Grid Integrated Vehicle (‘GIVe’).  

Chubu Electric Miraiz meanwhile said that demand response from customer sites and private power generation equipment will also be added into the VPP’s grid power adjustment resource pool and used a high-speed control engine it had developed in-house to control those resources and the NAS batteries. 

Energy-Storage.news reported on that project as it got underway in April 2021.

After the success of those demonstrations, transmission system operator approval has been given to the partners to provide balancing services including frequency response. Chubu Electric Power’s grid, in the central part of the main Japanese island Honshu mainly operates at 60Hz, but with a smaller portion at 50Hz. 

Chubu said that as the proportion of renewable energy on the grid increases, so will the need for balancing services. Japan is targeting for 36% to 38% of its power to come from renewable sources by 2030, up from a previously set target of 22% to 24% by that year.  

Nuvve recently signed an agreement in the US to add its technologies to VPP projects in development by Swell Energy, a distributed energy resources (DER) aggregation specialist which has signed over 300MWh of VPP contracts with US utilities.

NGK’s high temperature, rechargeable and long-duration NAS battery was developed in the late 1980s and used in regions including the US, Middle East and Asia.

Its biggest project to date was 108MW/648MWh of NAS battery energy storage systems (BESS) across several sites in Abu Dhabi, UAE, completed in 2018. More recently, chemicals company BASF commissioned a 950kW/5,800kWh system at one of its production sites in Antwerp, Belgium last year and NAS batteries are being used in Mongolia’s first-ever solar-plus-storage project, announced a few months ago. 

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Mark Settles

Sol-REIT is funding a portfolio of projects that provides three school districts in New Jersey communities with clean, renewable energy at a savings of up to 72% compared to the state’s average energy costs. Sol-REIT’s $9 million refinance loan to DIASASP Holdings, the developer of solar systems at Delsea Regional, Middletown Township and Plainfield school districts in New Jersey, will support continued renewable low-cost power generation for the districts under their power purchase agreements.

“It is critical that the benefits of clean, renewable solar energy are accessible to everyone,” states Tom Gleckner, project manager for DIASASP Holdings. “DIASASP is excited to provide significant power savings to these school districts, which also will benefit their entire communities and fund student needs in the future.”

The projects generate an accumulation of 7.4 MW of solar power from a total of 21,467 solar panels covering 25 different installations. Nearly 75% of the systems are roof-mounted, except for ground-mounted systems in the Delsea School District.

“This is another example of what Sol-REIT can do for the municipality, utility, school and hospital sectors,” says Mark Settles, CEO of Sol-REIT. “We are primed to handle a variety of projects focused on clean, renewable energy that provide developers working capital and cash flow to get these projects to COD and beyond. We are active with a successful REIT in the marketplace and we’re deploying capital.”

The projects will enable the school districts to reduce energy costs to as low as 3.83 cents per kWh hour, compared to New Jersey’s average statewide rates of 13.63 kWh. The project will potentially generate enough clean electricity to power more than 875 homes a year, based on the average U.S. home use of 11 MW per year.

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Kevin Hostetler

Kevin Hostetler has been appointed as CEO of Array Technologies, a provider of tracker solutions and services for the utility-scale solar energy industry. He will also join Array’s board of directors. Hostetler succeeds Jim Fusaro, who previously announced his intention to retire by the end of the year.

For the last four years, Hostetler has served as CEO at Rotork, a FTSE 250 company, where he led the company’s Growth Acceleration Program which drove improved margins, capital efficiency and commercial excellence.

“We are excited to welcome Kevin as CEO to lead Array through its next phase of growth,” states Brad Forth, chairman of Array Technologies. “Over the past few years, the Array team, led by Jim Fusaro, built a strong foundation which doubled the size of our business. As we look toward the future under Kevin’s leadership, Array will focus on executing on our long-term strategic initiatives and integrating the STI Norland business. Given his immense experience in senior leadership roles, we are confident Kevin can lead Array to growth and operational excellence for the foreseeable future.”

“Array Technologies is a company that I have admired for some time now,” Hostetler adds. “Array is a great intersection of my deep experience in engineered products and actuation, and my passion for the environment. Array’s innovative products are key to important constituents across the solar industry. As rapid expansion and increased demand for utility-scale solar has taken place, Array has truly made a difference by helping its customers optimally harness the power of the sun.”

Prior to joining Rotork in 2018, Hostetler served as CEO of FDH Infrastructure Services, leading the engineering and construction services provider through a series of acquisitions to support improvement of aging critical infrastructure, such as bridges, dams, and transmission towers. He was executive advisor to Wind Point Partners. He held ascending leadership roles over seven years at IDEX Corporation, where he served as an officer of the company and the group president of the Fluid and Metering Technologies Segment and IDEX Asia. Hostetler also spent seven years at Ingersoll Rand in progressive P&L leadership and business development roles within the Industrial Technologies Segment.

“On behalf of the board of directors, I’d like to thank Jim for his leadership and steady hand as he guided Array through a period of rapid growth and global market expansion,” continues Forth. “He was instrumental in leading Array through important milestones including the development of our SmarTrack software solution, our initial public offering and the acquisition of STI Norland, among many other achievements. Jim also prioritized people, fostering a culture of innovation that will remain core to Array’s identity.”

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One of the existing energy storage solution production facilities in Ankara of Kontrolmatic, the company launching the LFP gigafactory. Image: Kontrolmatic Technologies.

A new 1GWh lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery factory in Turkey serving the energy storage system (ESS) market will start production in Q4 2022, said Pomega Energy Storage Technologies, the company behind the project.

The Pomega Energy Storage factory in the capital Ankara will launch at the end of the year with 350MWh of production capacity eventually rising to 1GWh by Q1 2025, with an interim ramp-up set for Q2 2024.

It is being built on/in an existing factory acquired in the Polatlı Organized Industrial Zone and construction started at the end of 2021. It will produce LiFePO4, aka LFP, battery cells, packs, modules and containerised energy storage systems (ESS) on a zero-waste principle.

It will generate 40% of its electricity with rooftop solar as well as use a waste heat recovery plant and rain collection and re-use systems.

A delivery time of under two years for an LFP battery factory is certainly at the low end but others, like American Battery Factory, have announced similar project timelines.

Pomega’s parent company Kontrolmatic is an engineering company with a turnkey ESS solutions and has two existing factories operating in Ankara, making this move an example of vertical integration in the sector.

One of its factories in Kahzamankazan produces mobile energy solutions while a second, also in Polatlı, produces lithium-ion battery cells and ESS solutions. It says the new LFP factory will reduce dependence on foreign imports.

Istanbul-based Kontrolmatic set up its subsidiary Pomega in November last year. Kontrolmatic listed in 2020 and is mainly active in the development and integration of software, hardware and systems across a range of engineering solutions in energy, mining, industry and transportation.

One of its main competitors is Inovat, part of larger holding company Tetico, whose Ankara factory can assemble 200 energy storage system enclosures a year, though it has not yet announced plans to build any new battery factories.

The energy storage market in Turkey is set to grow substantially in the coming years as 2GW of wind and solar come online each year, according to a interview Energy-storage.news recently did with Can Tokcan, managing partner at Turkish energy storage EPC Inovat.

The country has only around 2MW of installed storage today – its first grid-connected battery was installed in April last year – but that is set to grow by a factor of a thousand to 2GW in the next 10 years. Especially in the face of ongoing global supply chain issues, domesticating its supply chain could help Turkey reach that.

Ford, SK On and local investor Koç Holding signed non-binding Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) last month that could see the launch of a new gigafactory development, although it would only be serving the electric vehicle (EV) market.

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The first cells were produced at Northvolt’s new gigafactory in Sweden, just before the end of last year. Image: Northvolt.

The EU-supported European Battery Alliance (EBA) will roll out a newly updated action plan to enable 90% of the Union’s demand for batteries to be met with domestically made products by 2030.

By 2021, €127 billion (US$138.7 billion) had already been invested into developing a battery manufacturing value chain in Europe, driven forwards by the Alliance, which was formed in 2017 to address the “industrial challenge” ahead.

However, to create a self-sufficient battery industry by 2030, €382 billion of additional investment will be required, the EBA said following a high-level industrial meeting it held just before the end of March. 

Once established, the market opportunity for the European battery industry could be worth about €250 billion per year by 2025. 

The Alliance features more than 750 industrial and innovation groups in the membership of its industrial workstream, called EBA250. More than 180 industrial battery projects are in development in the European Union, including 47 battery cell projects. 

Support mechanisms in place include the designation of battery projects with Important Project of Common European Interest (IPCEI) status worth more than €20 billion, as well as close to €1 billion being committed to research projects under the EU’s Horizon Europe research programme to 2027. 

In common with the US, batteries have been identified as an important part of Europe’s energy future, particularly for increasing adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and of renewable energy through stationary energy storage for some time. 

More recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which has wreaked havoc on supply chains and pushed up costs of the international transportation and import of battery materials and finished goods, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and ongoing electricity price spikes, have reinforced that importance.

US President Joe Biden’s latest strategic move in that regard has been to call on the nation’s Defense Act to rally support for his country’s domestic value chain development.

Updated action plan

The European Battery Alliance, led by European Commission vice president Maroš Šefčovič and coordinated by EU innovation accelerator programme EIT InnoEnergy has identified gaps that still must be addressed.

While significant progress has undoubtedly been made, those gaps in the upstream and downstream segments of the industry, as well as in skilling up the workforce need to be filled to create what EBA250 called a “resilient end-to-end battery industry”. 

In the upstream, that means resolving concerns around the mining of domestic raw materials as well as processing, refining and producing active battery grade materials, downstream the concerns are around recycling end-of-life batteries and manufacturing scrap as well as reintroducing materials recycled into the value chain. 

At the recent meeting, it was agreed that among immediate priority actions that need to be taken are the rapid adoption of EU battery regulation laws, which will gradually introduce things like carbon footprint labelling and recycled content requirements on batteries made and sold in the EU.

The regulation is currently at the stage of being negotiated with individual EU Member State countries to figure out how it will be implemented across the different regions of the common market. The EBA has said sustainability can be an important aspect of competitiveness for European battery companies. 

The regulation, including a ‘battery passport’ which will allow for tracking of devices and materials should have ambitious and stringent provisions, the group’s members have agreed. On a related note, trade association Flow Batteries Europe said that battery technologies such as flow batteries which don’t have internal storage are excluded from the passport as things stand and advocated for their inclusion.

There should also be legislation adopted to put batteries at the heart of EU decarbonisation plans, both in transport decarbonisation with EVs and renewables adoption, while measures to support and de-risk investments in raw and processed battery materials also need to be put in place, EBA said. 

The European Strategic Action Plan on Batteries, published last in 2018, will require an update, setting out new objectives — the 2018 plan stretched to 2025, while the update will take the continent to 2030. 

Among new ambitions and objectives expected for the new plan will be 100% domestic recycling coverage in the EU, sourcing 40% of active materials used in EU manufacturing domestically and covering 90% of cell manufacturing from within the continent. The expected value created will shoot up sharply from €250 billion a year by 2025, to €625 billion per year by 2030, with Europe aiming to be capable of supporting 1TWh of demand across mobility, energy storage system (ESS) and other sectors by then. 

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The Magat hydropower plant in Isabela, Philippines. Image: Aboitiz Power Group.

Philippines investor-owned utility AboitizPower and Norwegian renewables group Scatec have signed a EPC agreement with Hitachi Energy for it to build a 20MW/20MWh battery storage system, set to go online in 2024.

The joint venture (JV) between the companies, SN Aboitiz Power Group (SNAP), has made the final investment decision on the battery energy storage system (BESS) project at the 360MW Magat hydropower plant in Ramon, Isabela, in the north Philippines.

SNAP signed an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) agreement with Hitachi Energy on 25 March 2022, and construction will start later this year. Financing will be provided by the Bank of the Philippine Islands and China Banking Corporation.

A new press release doesn’t specify but AboitizPower said in October and again in January that the Magat BESS will be a one-hour, 20MW/20MWh system. It added that in connection with the project, the company would look at upgrading the nearby Magat-Santiago transmission line to ensure full dispatch of the Magat power plant capacity, the BESS and the expansion of a nearby floating solar PV plant.

The BESS has the potential to expand to 24MW and is expected to be used primarily for ancillary services but will also dispatch to the grid at peak times, the press release said.

The Philippine government is aiming to have an installed renewable power base of 20GW by 2040. SNAP, which was originally set up by another Nordic group SN Power that was later acquired by Scatec, operates 640MW of hydropower in the Philippines today.

The 20MW site is one of 12 BESS projects it has on the go with a total capacity of 248MW over the next 10 years, which it will use for regulation and contingency reserves. The first, a 49MW BESS on an oil barge floating power station in Maco, is expected to start commercial operations in 2022.

Norway-listed Scatec is targeting 15GW of renewable capacity to be in operation or under construction by the end of 2025. Aboitiz Power is targeting a generating capacity of 9.2GW by 2030 of which half will be renewable and the remainder thermal baseload builds. The company has committed to a moratorium on new coal plants and is conducting a study on how to decarbonise its portfolio together with the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation.

Aboitiz is the joint-largest power company in the Philippines with a market share of 21% along with SMC Global Power Holdings Corp. The latter has ordered large amounts of BESS projects from several international system integrators totalling a US$1 billion portfolio, including Fluence, Wärtsilä and ABB.

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