Manila Electric Co., the biggest retailer of electricity, is pursuing battery energy storage system that will help manage its distribution network.
Meralco inaugurated the San Rafael BESS facility in Bulacan early this month.
“That’s a pilot. From a DU perspective, we want to understand how battery energy storage really works and how it will help the network. We’re grateful to Hitachi for providing us 2 MW of battery storage energy system,” Meralco president Ray Espinosa said.
Meralco signed an agreement with Hitachi in 2017 in a bid to become the first distribution utility to deploy a grid-scale BESS in the distribution system in the Philippines.
The company wanted to demonstrate the potential of BESS to manage peak demand and energy, improve service reliability and power quality, and compensate for the intermittency of renewable generation.
“That would acquaint our network engineers on how we can use this energy storage system as a way of stabilizing renewables,” Espinosa said.