US-headquartered Fluence Energy, Inc. has completed the 570-megawatt battery energy storage system (BESS) project for leading Philippine energy player SMC Global Power Holdings Corp. (SMCGP) of the San Miguel group.

The company emphasized that the project’s completion milestone coincided with the commercial inauguration of the 1,000-megawatt/1,000 megawatt-hour energy storage fleet of the Philippine conglomerate, which was graced by no less than President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Energy Secretary Raphael P.M. Lotilla as well as other government officials from the Philippines, and from the United States and South Korean embassies.

According to Fluence, the BESS buildup being pursued by the San Miguel group serves as the “first and largest within the Southeast Asian region.”

The company noted that the 570MW of energy storage systems of SMCGP has been deployed across 18 sites in various parts of the country out of the 32 areas judiciously chosen for the BESS deployments of the San Miguel group.

The siting of the SMCGP projects, the American firm said, will be very strategic in providing “advanced grid stability as increasing amounts of intermittent renewable energy sources are added to the grid.”

Fluence further indicated that these projects “are providing critical grid stability services throughout the national transmission network in the Philippines including frequency response, reserve power, and voltage regulation.”

Don H. Lee, general manager for Southeast Asia and East Asia and VP Service, APAC at Fluence, asserted that “the inauguration of SMCGP’s energy storage system fleet is a key milestone for both SMCGP and Fluence in the ASEAN region.”

Lee shared that their company’s relationship with SMCGP started way back in 2018, “when they (SMC group) started to explore energy storage and realized its visionary potential for the Philippines.”

The BESS installations of SMCGP, in particular, are seen aiding the country immensely on the transformation of its energy mix that will be leaning more on renewable energy (RE) capacities moving forward.

“The deployment of these energy storage systems marks a significant milestone in the clean energy transition journey of the Philippines towards a cleaner, more resilient, and flexible grid,” the US firm stressed.

Apart from the BESS installation in Bataan, Fluence specified that the first grid-scale energy storage system completed by San Miguel was the one sited in Masinloc, which is proximate to its coal-fired power facility in that project site.

The other BESS projects which already passed grid compliance tests of system operator National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) had been those in Kabankalan (Negros); Malita (Davao Occidental); Maco (Davao de Oro); San Manuel (Pangasinan); Concepcion (Iloilo); Jasaan and Villanueva (Misamis Oriental); and Gamu (Isabela).