If you live in Frankfurt, Germany and have solar panels on your roof, you might be able to generate enough energy to power your whole home throughout the day. But if you pull in too much energy for your needs, or not enough, you can trade power with another solar-powered home in Hamburg, or Berlin, or anywhere in the country. That’s the principle behind sonnenCommunity, a nationwide, cloud-based virtual power plant launched around three years ago and made up of around 8,000 homes equipped with solar panels and an interconnected SonnenBatterie—an energy storage unit developed in 2010 by the German company Sonnen. “What’s happening in Germany with peer-to-peer power-sharing is something that’s talked about in the U.S. as a great idea for future energy-storage solutions,” says Blake Richetta, VP of sales for Sonnen U.S.
The sonnenCommunitie facilitates its energy transfers using the grid infrastructure that already exists in the country, “What we do in Germany is we essentially cut out the middleman—the utility–and we work directly with the grid operator,” Richetta says. Generally, regional utility companies manage the sale, distribution, and flow of energy through the grid and into homes throughout the region in which it operates. But because Germany has just one interconnected grid system, Sonnen is able to bypass the various regional utilities and work with the grid operator to manage the energy flow into and out of homes connected in the sonnenCommunitie, essentially acting as a nationwide utility for its customers.
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