sonnen opens new Operations Centre in Germany and increases production capacity by 10,000 energy storage units per month
With the new sonnen Operations Centre, sonnen has built one of the largest and most modern production facilities for energy storage in Europe. This also strengthens sonnen's position as a pioneer for digital energy technologies such as virtual power plants.
Wildpoldsried, November 3, 2021 – sonnen announced today that it has opened a new Operations Centre at its headquarters in Wildpoldsried as part of the company’s growth strategy.
The new 4,000 square metres Operations Centre – as big as a soccer field – can produce up to 10,000 sonnen batteries a month. The new facility will also house research and development as well as operational divisions to support the company.
With an average battery storage size of 10 kilowatt hours, this will allow sonnen to produce an annual capacity of 1.2 gigawatt hours of storage for clean energy. This will enable around 120,000 households to cover a large part of its energy needs with clean and self-generated energy each year.
"Energy storage systems and digital technologies such as our virtual power plant are key to a successful energy transition. This combination of decentralised storage and intelligent networking can make fluctuations in energy sources constant and stable,” says Oliver Koch CEO of sonnen. "Clean energy creates growth and competitiveness for industries and economies. Our global knowledge will allow us to create jobs in a dynamic and internationally fast-growing market in which we are a pioneer."
At its headquarters in the energy village of Wildpoldsried in Bavaria in Southern Germany, sonnen employs about 350 of its 850 employees worldwide, and new jobs are being created with this expansion. The energy storage systems are produced for the European markets and also partly for other international markets.
Each sonnenBatterie is technically designed to be part of sonnen's virtual power plant (VPP). sonnenBatteries in thousands of households can be part of a regional or national network that forms a virtual large-scale storage system that can relieve the power grid within seconds. Customer benefits vary from reduced electricity bills to financial incentives or even a share in the profits from the VPP. sonnen has successfully implemented innovative VPP projects in Italy, the USA and Australia.
In addition, sonnen operates its own battery research laboratory in Wildpoldsried, where new battery technologies are tested for use in its energy storage systems.
According to the German Energy Storage Association (BVES), there are around 300,000 energy storage units in Germany as of Spring 2021 and this is equivalent to a capacity of around 2.3 GWh.