German battery capacity up 150% since 2023

1Komma5° has presented an assessment of battery storage expansion based on statistics from the Battery Charts data platform maintained by Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen University’s Institute for Power Electronics and Electrical Drives, and Institute for Power Generation and Storage Systems.

The Battery Charts figures are based on the Federal Network Agency’s Market Data Register and the platform was developed by Jan Figgener, Christopher Hecht, Jonas Brucksch, Jonas van Ouwerkerk, and Dirk Uwe Sauer.

1Komma5° said Germany has around 20 GWh of battery storage capacity, up from 8 GWh in May 2023. Some 16.6 GWh of the latest figure falls within the “home system” category defined by Battery Charts as having up to 30 kWh capacity. That figure means some small commercial systems might be counted as home installations. Reducing the limit of “home” systems to 20 kWh still leaves residential units accounting for around 80% of Germany’s battery capacity.

“Commercial” systems – 30 kWh to 1 MWh, according to Battery Charts – make up around 860 MWh of Germany’s capacity, and large-scale batteries 2.7 GWh.

1Komma5° said the average 39 MWh of German battery capacity added monthly in 2019 has grown to 403 MWh.

“The battery expansion was largely driven by people who, in addition to photovoltaic systems, wall boxes, and heat pumps, also installed storage systems to increase the efficiency of their systems,” said Jannik Schall, co-founder and chief product officer of the Hamburg-based renewable energy company.

The balance is expected to shift, however, to large-scale systems, of which Germany had 7.3 GWh defined as in the planning stage in the market master data register in June. Home and commercial batteries are rarely registered in that database.

1Komma5° said Germany’s current battery fleet could power a town with a population of around 150,000 for six days or so.

The energy company said much of the country’s battery potential is untapped and cited a calculation by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems that Germany will need 100 GWh of storage capacity by 2030.

That will mean exploiting more of the energy storage potential of a nation which already has more than a million electric cars on its roads.

“The Federal Network Agency must, among other things, create better rules regarding when grid charges apply to temporarily stored electricity,” wrote 1Komma5°.

Schall said the government and bill payers could save “billions of euros” in avoided fuel import costs and grid congestion if Germany can exploit the grid potential of batteries by ensuring devices are “charged and discharged in line with electricity supply.” At the moment, he said, batteries serve “purely to optimize self-consumption and are not used for their grid benefit.”

From pv magazine Deutschland.