The Citicore Renewable Energy Corporation (CREC) has commissioned the Batangas 1 project in the Philippines, the country’s first to combine agrivoltaics (agriPV) with a battery energy storage system (BESS).
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. ceremonially led the energisation of the project yesterday (15 September). The power plant pairs a 197MWp solar PV array with a 320MWh BESS. Developer CREC said this enables it to output energy to the local grid outside the hours of 6am to 5pm when the solar PV modules are generating power.
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Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) listed CREC describes the plant as one of its strategic freehold land assets, and a key project in the sustainable diversification of the company’s portfolio.
It is in Tuy, a municipality in the province of Batangas, around 100km south-west of the capital, Manila. Batangas is a popular tourist region and home to a major international port.
In a speech at the event, the president noted that he had long considered the strong potential of renewable energy even before taking office. However, he was aware of competing land use with other needs, such as agriculture, barriers in terms of cost, and the limitations of variable generation.
Without the viable storage of electricity to provide a so-called baseload energy supply, there would be no choice but to return to fossil fuels, especially for industries that require 24/7 power.
Yet, Marcos Jr. said, solar PV technologies have improved and come down in cost, as have batteries.
“With the advent of actual reliable and viable energy battery technology, we can now get around that problem,” the president said.
“We can now get around that weakness of renewable energy because of battery technologies, will be able to collect power and to continue to provide that power even when there is no sun.”
Read the full version of this article on our sister site Energy-Storage.news.
PV Tech publisher Solar Media will host the 2025 Energy Storage Summit Asia in Manila, Philippines, next month, 7-8 October. Speakers will discuss how the Philippines’ BESS infrastructure is incentivising foreign investment, new business cases for BESS projects and how global storage manufacturing trends have impacted the region. Read the full agenda and purchase tickets on the event website.
