Singapore’s Jurong Island looks set to host a combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power plant with integrated battery storage.
Electricity generator and retailer PacificLight has selected a consortium comprising Mitsubishi Heavy Industries subsidiary, Mitsubishi Power Asia-Pacific, and Singapore-headquartered engineering and construction company Jurong Engineering, for engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) duties at the project.
The award of the contract was announced last week (23 October). The 670MW gas power plant will be the first CCGT unit in Singapore integrated with a battery energy storage system (BESS).
Mitsubishi Power Asia-Pacific will provide its M701 JAC gas turbine, which is readied for co-firing using hydrogen. The technology company claims the turbine achieves more than 64% combined cycle efficiency. It can run on 30% hydrogen immediately, and the company said it will be capable of running solely on hydrogen in the future.
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Energy-Storage.news reached out to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and PacificLight to enquire about the planned sizing, capacity and applications that the BESS will provide.
A Mitsubishi Heavy Industries spokesperson said that customer PacificLight will procure the BESS directly through a separate contract with the BESS supplier and declined to provide further details.
PacificLight, meanwhile, noted that the project design is not yet finalised in the following brief statement:
“The design and development of the BESS facility, including finalising the BESS storage capacity, will follow in due course as we work towards delivering a state-of-the-art solution to support Singapore’s energy transition and enhance grid reliability.”
The facility is scheduled to go into operation in 2029, adding to PacificLight Power’s (PLP’s) existing fleet that includes a 830MW CCGT facility and a 100MW Fast Start Ancillary Services facility, both on Jurong Island.
“This project represents a significant leap forward in PacificLight’s decarbonization journey and our commitment to powering Singapore with cleaner, more resilient energy,” PLP CEO Yu Tat Ming said.
“By investing in large-scale energy storage and hydrogen-ready technology, we are future-proofing our infrastructure to meet future energy demands.”
Jurong Island is home to much of Singapore’s industrial and energy infrastructure. The Southeast Asian city-state aims to achieve a net-zero emissions status by 2050. However, the lack of available land for renewable energy generation constrains Singapore’s ability to self-generate significant shares of solar and wind.
As such, the national Energy Market Authority (EMA) has been seeking to foster ways to maximise the use of renewable energy, including cross-border electricity imports from neighbours near and far from Indonesia and Malaysia to even Australia, and the trialling of grid-scale battery storage and virtual power plant (VPP) technologies to manage peak demand and provide grid services.
Inertia trial at Southeast Asia’s biggest BESS project
Engineering group Sembcorp’s battery storage system on Jurong Island already has landmark status as Southeast Asia’s biggest BESS so far. It was inaugurated in 2023 as a 200MW/285MWh system, meeting Singapore’s 200MW national energy storage deployment target for 2025 single-handedly.
It will now also be used to assess the ability of battery storage systems to provide inertia, which is essential for the stable operation of the electricity grid.
Sembcorp won the contract to deliver the BESS from the Energy Market Authority (EMA) through a competitive solicitation.
In October 2024, Singapore’s deputy prime minister and minister for trade and industry Gan Kim Yong said that Sembcorp and the EMA were in discussions about expanding the Jurong project, before recently completed work increased its capacity to 326MWh.
In the project’s next step, Sembcorp and the EMA are partnering to assess the BESS asset’s ability to provide inertia to the electricity grid.
One of the major technology trends in battery storage this year has been the increased recognition of how battery storage systems equipped with advanced inverters can play a more ‘grid-forming’ rather than ‘grid-following’ role in the electricity system.
System stability services which include inertia and short-circuit ratio have traditionally been delivered by the rotating mass of thermal power plants. Essentially, turbines spin and generate electricity, but they also set the grid frequency and keep it constant.
With the removal of thermal generation as fossil fuel plants retire, the energy capacity they provided can be replaced fairly simply with renewable energy and storage.
However, to also replace their grid-forming roles, markets with high variable renewable energy (VRE) penetration, such as Australia and the UK, are increasingly turning to BESS equipped with advanced inverters.
As explained in a recent Energy-Storage.news sponsored webinar with Envision, these inverter upgrades are not necessarily expensive or difficult but do require some hardware and software reconfiguration and more importantly a regulatory or market structure to incentivise and direct their use.
“Energy storage plays an important role in enabling Singapore’s energy transition. In particular, BESS have the potential to provide a wide range of energy services, including frequency regulation for the power grid,” EMA chief executive Puah Kok Keong said.
“Our collaboration with Sembcorp will allow us to test and understand these new BESS capabilities better. The knowledge and experienced gained will help EMA plan for a grid that is cleaner, smarter and more resilient.”
In its announcement this morning, Sembcorp stated that the expansion of the project at Jurong involved vertically expanding the operational BESS within the same land area. The company claimed this to be a first-of-a-kind pilot of a battery stacking solution.
On announcing the inertia trial yesterday (27 October), Sembcorp also unveiled a 118MWp solar PV plant on the island. It occupies six land parcels in an industrial zone. Sembcorp, headquartered in Singapore, has deployed just over a gigawatt (1,065MW) of solar capacity across the country in ground-mount, rooftop and floating PV systems.
Meanwhile, EMA yesterday also announced the launch of a regulatory sandbox for VPP platforms and a call for proposals for projects to enhance grid planning. Both have been launched under the EMA’s Future Grid Capabilities Roadmap, created in partnership with state-owned electricity and gas distribution company Singapore Power Group (SP Group).
The VPP sandbox will test the technical and operational capabilities of distributed energy resources (DERs) to participate in providing energy and ancillary services to the grid in Singapore. Partners in the project are VPP company Blue Whale Energy, Nanyang Technological University and SP Group.
