How Batteries learned to talk
As partners for intelligent storage technology we developed and integrated decentralized power storage in the EU-sponsored “smart-grid“ pilot project “Web2Energy“ run by the local utility HSE in the German city of Darmstadt.
In a global first, batteries are now actively communicating with energy consumers and providers via a communications interface based on the international IEC 61850 standard. In the future, all energy production units globally will ‘speak’ this ‘language’ with their respective control units.
Why?
Large power plants, but particularly almost all new and decentralized energy production units such as wind and solar generators as well as biomass, modern gas and decentral combined heat and power plants use IEC 61850 to better match generation to demand.
That’s why it’s so important that storage units can ‘join the conversation’. Instead of just stubbornly following a previously defined schedule to store or dispense energy, batteries will know what the system needs. This increases
the efficiency of the entire system and lowers costs.
For the Web2Energy project, we developed our four IEC 61850-capable 5kW/4kWh Lithium-Ion storage units and enabled two kW/100 kWh Vanadium-Redox-Flow storage units of our partner Cellstrom for IEC 61850 as well. We also developed and deployed ten storage simulators that also ‘speak’
IEC 61850.
This demonstrates how intelligent storage technology, energy sources and demand can be efficiently coordinated, thus creating more space for more renewable energy.
