Großspeicher. Foto: ELLI
Volkswagen is entering a new business area with the Elli charging and energy brand and will develop, build and operate large-scale stationary storage systems together with partners along the value chain. Elli’s industrial energy storage systems will be used in the future to supply customers and for arbitrage transactions on the electricity trading market. As things stand, the first Elli battery storage projects could be set up as early as next year.
The largest projects in the Elli project pipeline currently have an output of up to 350 MW and a storage capacity of 700 MWh. With a total storage capacity currently installed in Germany of around one gigawatt hour, this project would correspond to almost a doubling. “Germany and Europe need sufficient storage solutions to meet the increasing demand and to balance the volatile feed-in of renewable energies. Our investments in stationary battery storage systems are therefore a significant contribution to the sustainable transformation of the energy supply,” says Volkswagen Group Board Member for Technology Thomas Schmall.
The need for storage solutions is enormous: In 2023 alone, around 10,500 gigawatt hours from renewable electricity sources were not generated in Germany because there were no options for intermediate storage. This amount of electricity would have been enough to run more than 3.2 million electric vehicles on green electricity for a year. In order to compensate for the volatility of renewable energies, the Fraunhofer Institute expects a need for more than 100 GWh of battery storage by 2030.
By entering the industrial energy storage business, Elli is reaffirming its leading role in the mobility and energy transition. “We see great financial potential in this business area and the opportunity to develop Elli into a holistic energy provider in Europe,” explains Giovanni Palazzo, CEO of Elli
