Sungrow and Citicore Renewable Energy Corporation have signed an agreement under which CREC will buy 1.5 GWh of battery energy storage from Sungrow, to be built alongside its solar plants in the Philippines. The two companies describe it as the largest battery storage supply agreement in Southeast Asia to date, and Sungrow will provide engineering and construction design as well as the equipment.

The reason the batteries are there is grid congestion. The first project carries 302 MWp of solar panels, but at midday the connection point to the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines cannot carry the full output, so some generation would otherwise be wasted. Storage lets the surplus be held during the day and dispatched at night, the standard argument for pairing batteries with solar in a market where the grid reaches about 91 per cent of the country.

Speed as a claim, capacity as a fact

The equipment is Sungrow's PowerTitan 2.0. The release makes much of timing: such overseas orders usually take six months from signature to delivery, the companies say, while the first batch here shipped in two. Oliver Tan, CREC's president and chief executive, said the batteries would let the company supply needed power at any point of day or night; Shawn Shi, Sungrow's vice president for PV and energy storage, said the technology would help meet the country's power needs.

An agreement is a commitment to buy, not installed capacity, and a first batch is not the plant. The claim of the largest agreement in Southeast Asia is the companies' own description of a market they are selling into. Storage shifts when electricity is delivered rather than adding energy, and the benefit depends on how often the batteries are cycled, a figure the announcement does not give.