Where are the batteries?
We are entering the age of megawatt-scale batteries. I wondered how far we have come in Germany, so I created this map showing the latest projects.
The map shows all battery projects (installed or concretely planned) with a rated power of at least 1 MW, according to the Marktstammdatenregister. I was surprised to find already almost 1 GW of large-scale battery capacity distributed all over the country. Most of them are li-ion batteries. The projects’ average energy-to-power (E/P) ratio is around 1.3 h. I find it interesting to scroll through the list of operators - lots of big names but also projects that seem connected to a local municipality or solar park operator. As far as I know, the batteries are still mainly operating in the balancing markets, but some projects are adjacent to significant wind and solar projects, so that you could use them for feed-in management.
The data (which has an open license, by the way) was pretty easy to filter and retrieve. You can check out the source code here, where I described the data operations in more detail. The project uses the folium package, a nice Python wrapper around leaflet.js.
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