ABB will add at least 80MW of battery storage to Philippines energy company SMC Global Power Holdings’ planned US$1 billion portfolio in the country.

The Philippines is set to become a “full-sized market” for energy storage within a couple of years, according to Wärtsilä’s director for the Australasia region.

Power and energy systems technology group Wärtsilä has completed work on two large-scale battery energy storage system (BESS) projects in the Philippines.

The energy storage system integration division of Wärtsilä Corporation will deploy a large-scale floating battery energy storage system for a thermal power facility in the Philippines.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has signed a loan deal for its first wind energy-plus-battery storage project in Thailand, which is also the country’s first private sector initiative to combine the two technologies at scale.

The pilot project, which comprises two 1MW components, has been billed by its backers as the country’s first grid-scale distributed battery system.

Questions around who should own, operate and ultimately benefit from the deployment of energy storage systems could soon be resolved in the Philippines after the government Department of Energy issued a set of draft guidelines.

The Senate committee examining a house bill granting a PV mini-grid franchise to renewable energy firm Solar Philippinnes has been debating the reach of the franchise as well as its exclusivity, with the discussion to reconvene in May after the general election.

The economics of rural electrification using microgrids should be considered an investment for the future, akin to how Silicon Valley tech providers plough money into initially loss-leading products and services, the chief of developer and manufacturer Solar Philippines has said.

Solar modules and deep cycle batteries have been stolen from seven secondary public schools in two municipalities in southern Palawan, in the Philippines.