Today, in a residential quarter in the Berlin district of Reinickendorf, WindNODE partners Gewobag, Lumenion and Vattenfall presented a new type of high-temperature storage that supports the reliable and grid-supporting supply of electricity and heat from regional renewable energy. In a single year, storage start-up Lumenion has constructed a steel storage block. The installation, with a storage volume of 2.4 megawatt-hours (MWh), is now being installed in the local power and heating grid operated by Vattenfall Energy Solutions. This can be found in the Tegel-Süd residential area of the state-owned Gewobag Wohnungsbau-Aktiengesellschaft Berlin.
‘This is an integral milestone for our technology, but also for an equally cost-efficient decarbonisation of our energy system,’ Lumenion founder and CEO Alexander Voigt happily announces. ‘Our steel storage technology makes it possible to administer clean energy with a time delay; and not just heat, but electricity as well. It is thanks to this discovery that we are already able to start planning other systems with 40 and even 500 MWh.’
In the pilot project in Tegel, the steel storage unit is being tested for commercial use and transferred to regular operation. In order to achieve this aim, the storage unit is integrated into the local power and heating grid of the Gewobag residential area, together with an already existing gas-fired combined heat and power (CHP) unit of Vattenfall Energy Solutions GmbH. The unit will temporarily store electricity spikes and later feed them back into the heat supply grid when required. Following this, the installation can also be expanded with a power generator.
