Research project on »battery storage sharing« enters field test phase

With the entry into the »field phase« in a residential neighborhood in Bielefeld, Germany, the practical tests within the framework of the research project »MELANI« (Sustainable Integration of Multiple-Use Energy Storage in Multi-Family Housing) have begun. This project aims to investigate the technical as well as the organizational and economic aspects of how the residential parties of a multi-family house can share a photovoltaic system and a battery storage.
For the practical test, a total of 94 kilowatts of solar power capacity was installed on four apartment buildings, as well as two battery storage units with a capacity of 67 kilowatt hours each for two houses. Two houses are directly involved in the MELANI project, with the other two serving as comparators. In the MELANI houses, residents can use a web portal to track whether they are currently drawing electricity – at different prices in each case – from the PV system, the battery storage or the grid and adjust their consumption behavior accordingly. They can also temporarily assign their own share of the PV system and battery storage to neighbors for a rental fee.
The project, which involves the green energy supplier Naturstrom, SMA Solar Technology AG, the Federal Physical-Technical Institute and the elenia Institute for High Voltage Technology and Energy Systems at the Technical University of Braunschweig, started in January 2021. According to plans at the time, the practical phase was actually supposed to begin in early 2022.
© PHOTON