People sitting opposite the Marina Bays Sands hotels and resorts in Singapore. The city-state is set to start operating South-East Asia's largest energy storage system in November. - AFP
SINGAPORE (Xinhua): Singapore's Second Minister for Trade and Industry Tan See Leng said on Wednesday that SembCorp is installing a 200-megawatt (MW) Energy Storage System (ESS) on Singapore's Jurong Island, which will be operational by November.
"This is the largest ESS deployment in South-East Asia," Tan told the second Singapore-IRENA High-Level Forum at the Singapore International Energy Week. "This project will support our efforts to enhance grid reliability and also maximise solar deployment in Singapore."
According to a statement from Singapore's Energy Market Authority (EMA), the authority appointed Sembcorp Industries to build, own and operate 200MW/200MWh of ESS to enhance the resilience of the country's energy supply and power grid in June.
The ESS is currently being installed across two sites on Jurong Island and spans two hectares of land. When operational next month, it will be the largest ESS deployment in South-East Asia, and one of the fastest of its size to be deployed.
EMA said ESS functions as large-scale batteries to store energy and dispense it at other times when needed to maintain grid reliability. The fast-response nature of ESS also allows it to actively manage mismatches in electricity supply and demand, and perform regulation services to address second-to-second fluctuations in the power grid, which can mitigate the impact of solar intermittency.
In view of the ongoing volatility in the global energy market, ESS can be used to store energy to provide reserves to the power grid when needed, freeing up power generation plants to generate more electricity to meet demand, the authority said.
It added that the ESS will use lithium iron phosphate batteries, of which the technology is a proven, safe and high-performing method of renewable energy storage widely used worldwide.
