The terms of the third Green Energy Auction were published in 2024 for three technologies: geothermal, impounding hydro and pumped-storage hydro, for delivery between 2026 and 2035. The two earlier rounds had contracted more than 5,000 MW of solar and onshore wind and nothing that could be dispatched. The third round is the correction.
Compiled in September 2026 from the releases of the time, with the revisions the agencies have published since. Nothing here is a forecast.
What pumped storage is
Two reservoirs at different heights and a reversible turbine between them. When electricity is cheap, at midday under a grid full of solar, the plant pumps water up; when it is dear, in the evening peak, the water comes down through the turbine. The round trip loses about a fifth of the energy and moves the rest six hours later, which is exactly what a solar-heavy grid needs.
Why the auction needed it
By 2024 the grid's midday supply was growing faster than its evening supply, and the dry-season alerts came at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Solar cannot serve the second. Batteries can for two to four hours; pumped storage can for longer and for decades. The round is designed to buy the evening.
The sites
The Philippines has the terrain for it, in the Cordillera, the Sierra Madre and Mindanao, and several projects had held service contracts for years without a route to a contract. The round gave them one, and when it was awarded the following June it procured about 6,350 MW of pumped storage across a dozen projects, far more than any other technology in any round.
What it says to a plant
The grid's answer to its own intermittency is a very large civil-engineering programme with a decade of construction ahead. A site that needs firm steam and power in the years before those reservoirs fill is, once again, on its own. The residue on its yard is a store of energy too, and one it already owns.
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