With the increasing importance of electric drive systems for the mobility of the future, the spread of traction batteries is also growing. The automobile manufacturer BMW and the electricity trading company Energy2Market GmbH (e2m) have now developed a concept for the further use of batteries from electric vehicles: up to 700 traction batteries, most of which previously powered electric cars, now form a large accumulator with an output of 10 MW and a total capacity of 15 MWh on the BMW factory premises in Leipzig.

The "second-life" batteries are used to temporarily store the electricity produced locally in four wind turbines, thereby optimising local energy management. The world’s largest storage facility of its kind has also been integrated into the public power grid and will contribute to its stabilisation through the bi-directional supply of control energy. The primary control energy is marketed through a connection between the storage farm and the e2m Virtual Power Plant.

The storage farm will be scientifically monitored over a period of more than three years. Research is being conducted on the extent to which such a storage farm might be able to optimize the load profile of large industrial manufacturing plants; also, researchers are investigating how it can contribute to maintaining grid stability and compensating volatility resulting from the fluctuating feed-in of wind or solar energy. In addition, the scalability of such a storage solution and business models for its successful marketing will be investigated.

The project is being funded as part of the WindNODE initiative, which supports projects for the intelligent use of renewable energies. The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) is supporting the project through its funding programme “Schaufenster Intelligente Energie - Digitale Agenda für die Energiewende (SINTEG)” (Smart Energy Showcases – Digital Agenda for the Energiewende).