Malaysia MyBeST BESS: First Project Breaks Ground

On 13 October 2026, Leader Energy reported that construction had begun on a 100 MW / 400 MWh battery energy storage system at Pajam, Negeri Sembilan. It is the first of the four projects awarded under Malaysia’s MyBeST programme to move from paper to site. That makes October 2026 the first point at which the programme’s 2027 commissioning target can be tested against something physical rather than inferred from a tender document.

This article sets out what is actually on the public record for all four MyBeST projects as of 17 October 2026, where the published figures do not reconcile, and which terms have never been disclosed at all. The last part matters more than the first: most of what a bid model or a market forecast needs from MyBeST has not been published, and several widely repeated figures are nominal rather than confirmed.

What MyBeST is, and who runs it

MyBeST (Malaysia Battery Energy Storage System) is Peninsular Malaysia’s first competitive procurement programme for grid-connected battery storage. It is administered by the Energy Commission (Suruhanjaya Tenaga, ST), not by TNB and not by the energy ministry.

The programme was launched in November 2024 as a two-stage bidding process. ST received 28 applications and announced the shortlist on 19 December 2025. Four projects were selected, each nominally 100 MW / 400 MWh, for a stated programme total of 400 MW / 1,600 MWh, with commissioning targeted for 2027. Each developer builds, owns and operates its own project.

One detail from ST’s own framing is worth keeping: each of the four selected bidders proposed a different battery technology supplier, which ST said would let it assess different BESS configurations. That is a design choice, not an accident — it means the four projects are not four copies of the same asset, and their performance data will not be directly comparable.

The four projects, as far as they are public

Below is every project-level fact that has been published, with the source date attached. Anything not listed has not been disclosed.

Developer	Capacity	Site	Battery / integrator	Status at 16 Oct 2026
Leader Energy (via Leader Energy Storage Sdn Bhd)	100 MW / 400 MWh	Pajam, Negeri Sembilan	Not disclosed	Under construction (reported 13 Oct 2026)
ERS Energy + Gamuda Berhad	100 MW / 440 MWh	Pekan, Pahang	HyperStrong (system integrator)	Awarded; construction start not disclosed
Blueleaf Energy + Universal Peak (project company BKHM BESS Sdn Bhd)	100 MW / 400 MWh	Not disclosed	Not disclosed	BESSA + Connection Agreement signed with TNB, June 2026; financial close with UOB 1 Sep 2026; COD target mid-2027
ERS Energy (standalone bid)	100 MW / 400 MWh	Not disclosed	Not disclosed	Awarded

Two of the four sites are public. One integrator is public. One project has published its contract type and its financial close. No tariff, no contract term and no interconnection point is public for any of the four.

The 1,600 MWh total does not reconcile with the published project sizes

This is the kind of discrepancy that propagates quietly into market models, so it is worth stating plainly.

ST’s programme total is 400 MW / 1,600 MWh, which implies four projects of 400 MWh each. But the Pekan project held by the ERS Energy and Gamuda consortium has been reported at 100 MW / 440 MWh (Energy-Storage.News, 28 May 2026). If that figure is right, either the programme total has been restated, or at least one project exceeds its nominal size, or the 440 MWh refers to installed capacity before degradation allowance while the 400 MWh refers to guaranteed usable capacity.

All three are plausible, and ST has not published per-project figures that would settle it. The practical consequence: 1,600 MWh should be treated as the programme’s nominal target, not as a confirmed installed total. A forecast that sums four projects at 400 MWh each and presents the result as a hard number is reporting an assumption as a fact.

The 400 MWh / 440 MWh distinction is not academic for anyone modelling these assets. A 10% difference in energy capacity at fixed power rating changes the duration from 4.0 to 4.4 hours, which changes which services the asset can stack and how a capacity-style payment would be sized.

What is contracted, and what is still undisclosed

One of the four projects has reached contract, and that fixes the shape of the deal for the programme. The pricing inside it does not.

What is contracted. BKHM BESS Sdn Bhd, the project company of the Blueleaf Energy and Universal Peak consortium, signed a Battery Energy Storage System Service Agreement (BESSA) and a Connection Agreement with Tenaga Nasional Berhad in June 2026, with the TNB Single Buyer named as offtaker. The BESSA covers capacity and related services — system availability, dispatch commitments and performance obligations — and Energy-Storage.News describes it as working similarly to a power purchase agreement. The consortium reached financial close with UOB on 1 September 2026, targeting commissioning in mid-2027. So the counterparty is the utility, and the battery is paid for availability rather than for energy sold.

That is the structural answer, and it is the one that matters most for a risk assessment: under a BESSA with the Single Buyer, a MyBeST asset is contracted rather than merchant-exposed. What follows is what remains genuinely unpublished.

The BESSA price. Not disclosed. Neither the availability payment nor any capacity rate under the BESSA has been published, and the financing terms with UOB were not disclosed either. This is the figure that decides the return, and it is the one still missing.

The contract term. Not disclosed. The BESSA’s length in years has not been published, so no levelised cost figure for these projects can be derived — the denominator is unknown even though the contract type is not.

How dispatch is actually allocated. The BESSA is described as covering dispatch commitments, but the mechanics are not public: who calls the asset, on what notice, and what happens to any residual value the owner might capture outside those calls. Availability-based payment and owner-captured arbitrage are not mutually exclusive, and nothing published says which applies here.

Bid prices. ST’s shortlist announcement did not reveal bid details. Any “Malaysian BESS price” circulating with a MyBeST attribution is an estimate, not a disclosed number.

Whether the other three have signed. Only the BKHM BESS agreements and financial close have been announced. No BESSA signing, financial close or construction start has been published for the ERS Energy standalone project or the Blueleaf consortium’s peers, and Leader Energy’s construction start was reported without any accompanying contract detail. Treating all four as contracted on the BKHM terms is an inference, not a fact.

Interconnection points. ST had not publicly released the interconnection points for the four projects as of January 2026, and two of the four sites remain undisclosed. Given that Peninsular Malaysia’s grid constraints are concentrated and location-specific, a project’s connection point is a material variable, not a detail. We looked at how those constraints are concentrating around large new loads in our analysis of Johor’s data centre build-out and grid capacity.

MyBeST is not Malaysia’s only BESS procurement route

A common error is treating MyBeST as the whole of Malaysian storage procurement. It is one route among several, and it is not the largest by nameplate.

The sixth large-scale solar round (LSS6) is run by PETRA — the Ministry of Energy Transition and Water Transformation — not by ST. It sought 2.5 GW of solar PV co-located with 1.25 GW of BESS, split into a 2.2 GW solar / 1.1 GW BESS package and a 300 MW solar / 150 MW BESS package, both at a 50% storage-to-solar ratio. Bid windows for the two solar-plus-storage packages ran from 27 July to 7 August 2026, with a separate standalone solar package from 17 to 28 August 2026. Awarded LSS6 projects are expected to reach commercial operation no later than the end of 2029 (Energy-Storage.News, 28 July 2026).

So Malaysia has at least two active procurement channels for grid-scale storage, with different administrators, different contract vehicles, different timelines and different co-location requirements. They are not additive in any simple way, and a project cannot be assumed to be eligible for both. We set out the full set of routes and how they differ in our guide to battery storage procurement routes in Malaysia.

Programme timeline on the public record

Date	Event
November 2024	ST launches MyBeST as a two-stage competitive bid
—	28 applications received
19 December 2025	ST announces four shortlisted projects
6 January 2026	Blueleaf Energy / Universal Peak confirm their award publicly
28 May 2026	HyperStrong named as integrator for the Pekan project (100 MW / 440 MWh)
June 2026	BKHM BESS signs BESSA and Connection Agreement with TNB (TNB Single Buyer as offtaker)
1 September 2026	BKHM BESS reaches financial close with UOB; terms not disclosed
27 July – 28 August 2026	LSS6 bid windows (separate programme, run by PETRA)
13 October 2026	Leader Energy reports construction has begun at Pajam, Negeri Sembilan
2027	Target commissioning for all four MyBeST projects

Fourteen months elapsed between the shortlist and the first reported construction start. For anyone building a timeline assumption for a comparable ASEAN procurement, that interval is more useful than the programme’s own target date, because it is observed rather than announced.

What to verify before using any MyBeST figure

Three checks, in this order.

One: is the energy capacity nominal or project-specific? If a number is 1,600 MWh or 400 MWh per project, it is the programme’s nominal figure. The one project-specific figure on the record differs from it.

Two: is the revenue assumption built on the contract type or on a price? The contract type is known for one project — a BESSA with the TNB Single Buyer, paying for availability. The price under it is not, for any project, and neither is the term. So the risk character of a MyBeST asset can be stated with confidence; its return cannot. Any IRR, LCOS or payback figure attributed to MyBeST still rests on an assumed tariff and an assumed contract length. That is not disqualifying — it has to be labelled.

Three: which programme is the figure actually from? MyBeST (ST, 400 MW, COD 2027) and LSS6 (PETRA, 1.25 GW of BESS, COD by end 2029) are routinely conflated. They have different administrators and are nearly three years apart on commissioning.

The broader point generalises beyond Malaysia. In policy-led storage markets, the published capacity number arrives years before the contract terms that determine whether the capacity is economic. The capacity figure is the one that gets quoted; the contract terms are the ones that decide whether the asset gets built. When only the first is available, the honest form of a forecast is a range with its assumptions named — not a point estimate.

Verification

Figures in this article were verified on 17 October 2026 against: Energy-Storage.News reporting of 8 January 2026 (shortlist, programme structure, 28 applications, interconnection points not released), 28 May 2026 (Pekan project, 100 MW / 440 MWh, HyperStrong as integrator), 28 July 2026 (LSS6 packages and bid windows) and 7 September 2026 (financial close with UOB on 1 September 2026, BESSA signed in June, commissioning target mid-2027); the Blueleaf Energy press releases of 6 January 2026 (award) and 5 June 2026 (BESSA and Connection Agreement with TNB, TNB Single Buyer as offtaker, build-own-operate); SolarQuarter reporting of 13 October 2026 (Leader Energy construction start at Pajam, Negeri Sembilan); and DFDL’s legal update on the programme’s two-stage structure.

Correction, 17 October 2026: an earlier version of this article stated that no MyBeST offtake structure had been disclosed. That was wrong. The BESSA and Connection Agreement signed by BKHM BESS with TNB in June 2026, and the September 2026 financial close, were already on the public record. The contract type and counterparty are known; the price and the term are what remain undisclosed, and the article has been corrected accordingly.

Malaysian storage procurement is moving quickly and several of the gaps identified above may be closed by ST or PETRA after this date. Check the primary announcements before relying on any figure here.