The sonnen Group can set another milestone internationally with its networked storage technology. Together with Wasatch Energy and Soleil Energy, sonnen is equipping several housing estates in California with photovoltaic systems and sonnenBatteries. The advantage for the 3,000 households: This reduces the residents' electricity costs and they have a clean and, above all, safe energy supply even in the event of a power failure.
Furthermore, the individual storage systems can be networked using the sonnenVPP software to form virtual power plants (VPP). The total storage capacity is 60 megawatt hours and the output is over 24 megawatts.
The 3,000 sonnenBatterien are distributed among a total of seven housing estates in California. The first installations with more than 417 battery units will begin in September in the Heron Pointe housing estate in Fresno. The entire project is financed by Wasatch Energy and external investors and has a volume of 130 million dollars.
Second collaboration in the US
"We are very pleased that we can offer the people in California a solution to supply them with a clean, affordable and secure energy supply," says Christoph Ostermann, CEO and founder of sonnen. “California is a very interesting but also highly competitive market for us, from which many new ideas come. It is therefore a huge success for a young company that our technology has proven itself as a crucial component for the transformation and digitisation of the energy system, especially here."
This is the second project that sonnen and Wasatch are implementing together in the US. Last year, work began on the new “Soleil Lofts” apartment complex near Salt Lake City in the state of Utah, in which 600 apartments will be equipped with a sonnenBatterie. The storage systems networked to form a VPP are already being used for network services by the energy supplier Rocky Mountain Power.
Urgent need for solutions
In the US, California is one of the states that are ambitiously promoting renewable energies. By 2030, 60 per cent of the electricity supply is to be converted to renewable energies, and 100 per cent should be achieved by 2045.
At the same time, there are always power outages. As recently as mid-August 2020, the network operator California ISO declared a level-3 emergency for the first time since 2001, in which entire communities were disconnected from the power supply for about an hour. This was intended to control a surge in the demand for electricity, which was triggered by a heat wave and the resulting sharp rise in electricity use. The need for innovative solutions to stabilise the power grid, such as the sonnen virtual storage power plant, is correspondingly urgent in California.
sonnen is already active on three continents with virtual power plants for home storage. In addition to Germany, Italy and the UK, also in Australia and the USA. In Germany, sonnen is active on the primary control line market with a virtual power plant consisting of home storage systems and has also been operating peak load capping in the distribution network since 2020. (mfo)
