Singapore-based energy and urban development group Sembcorp is building a 200-megawatt-hour battery storage system on Jurong Island, which is home to most of Singapore's industrial activity.
Jurong Island was formed through land reclamation work that began in the late 1960s and eventually became one of the world's top ten chemical production centers and five refinery export centers.
As part of the government's green economy policy, work is underway to transform it into a sustainable energy and chemicals park by 2030, and the amount of renewable energy generated and used on the island is increasing.
Singapore's Energy Market Authority (EMA) issued an Expression of Interest (EOI) in May to build a 200MW/200MWh battery storage system. Sembcorp said in a statement yesterday that it expects to complete work on the battery energy storage system (BESS) deployment by the end of this year.
Sembcorp is one of EMA’s partners in the accelerated deployment of energy storage in Singapore, which began in late 2018 and has received support from the authorities to build the country’s first distributed virtual power plant (VPP). The EMA has identified the ability of energy storage to help integrate renewable energy and improve the overall reliability of the energy supply and grid.
Singapore's first large-scale battery energy storage system to be connected to the grid in 2020 is a 2.4MWh system from Wärtsilä.
While only a handful of distributed energy storage systems and small pilot projects have been installed since then, EMA's preparations include commissioning the publication of an energy storage technology roadmap, a manual on regulatory requirements for installing energy storage, and a consumer guide.
At its EOI in May, the EMA is soliciting energy storage system (ESS) capacity that can serve different functions during two phases of its expected life.
During the first two years of the project, ESS will provide "200MW/200MWh of spinning reserves to free up combined cycle gas turbines for power generation". For the remainder of its life, it will be "primarily used to provide frequency regulation to mitigate solar intermittency and ensure grid reliability during solar hours".
Bidders will build, own and operate the energy storage capacity, and the EMA has set a November deadline for the project to come online. Proposals are limited to systems using lithium-ion or vanadium redox flow battery storage.
EMA has set a target to deploy 200MW of energy storage by 2025. While this single award will go beyond that, the authority noted that it expects to need more funding to meet the national target of 2GWp of solar PV by 2030.
