(REPOST: Energy Storage News)
The freshly announced ‘sonnenCharger’ is aimed at maximising the opportunity to charge EVs with clean, solar-generated electricity, while enabling sonnen to connect their batteries into a ‘virtual power plant’, turning them into a flexible load on the grid.
Initially launching in Germany, where the company first launched SonnenCommunity back in 2015, the vehicle-linked devices will also feed into the sonnenCommunity. The peer-to-peer ‘energy sharing’ network now incorporates ‘sonnenFlat’ the solar-plus-storage ‘flat-rate’ plan applicable to sonnenCharger.
If a residential customer does not have enough energy stored in their battery from their own solar-plus-storage system to charge their car, they can dip into the sonnenCommunity pool and draw excess power generated and stored by their neighbours, via the grid. Conversely, at times of surplus the power they feed into their own EV or solar home battery can benefit the wider network.
“With our pool of sonnenBatteries, we are already connecting thousands of energy storage systems into the world’s largest virtual power plant of its kind. With the sonnenCharger, we can now also bring electric vehicles into the system, offering benefits to both utilities and consumers alike,” sonnen’s director for sales and marketing, Philipp Schröder, said.
“E-mobility can only succeed if it becomes an active part of the energy system. Many local power grids are not set up to accommodate the increasing number of electric cars. Instead of spending millions for installing bigger and bigger cables, we are offering a sustainable solution that integrates electric cars into the grid to intelligently control their charging and reduce the strain on distribution grids,” added Schröder.