Meralco PowerGen Corp. is planning to put up a 20 to 40-megawatt-hour battery energy storage system in Carmen, Cebu next year to address the Visayas region’s regulating reserves requirement, a top executive said Tuesday.
“We’re looking at putting a battery in Cebu. We’re working with a company called AFRY to help us develop the optimum sizing as a standalone battery,” MGen president Emmanuel Rubio said at the sidelines of Schneider Electric Innovation Day Philippines 2025.
Rubio said they expect to have the battery project operational by the third quarter of 2026.
“One thing that we’re really excited about, I’m excited about, is in energy storage. The cost of energy storage is actually going down, and how the performance of energy storage actually improved through the years,” he said.
“Long-duration energy storage are actually now almost the norm when you look for energy storage to store your extra capacity of variable renewable energy when it’s not needed,” Rubio said.
Rubio said they are also in talks with Schneider Electric to look into predictive analytics at MGen’s coal plants which are under Global Business Power Corp.
These includes Panay Energy Development Corp. (PEDC) which owns and operates clean coal-fired plants in Iloilo City.
It also has a stake in Cebu Energy Development Corp. (CEDC) which owns and operates a 246-MW clean coal-fired power plant in Toledo City. CEDC is a consortium composed of Global Business Power, Aboitiz Power Corp. and Vivant Energy Corp.
GBPC also owns a 50-percent stake in Alsons Thermal Energy Corp. (ATEC), which in turn owns a 75-percent stake in Sarangani Energy Corp., operator of the 237 MW coal-fired power plant in Maasim, Sarangani.
“These are units that are more than 10 years old. We’re talking about upgrades in its DCS [distributed control systems],” he said.
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