sonnen pooled thousands of home batteries into one virtual power plant for the grid

sonnen, a German battery maker led by Christoph Ostermann, built the sonnenCommunity: around a quarter of a million users of sonnen products join a network in which surplus solar energy can be shared virtually among members.

The community's batteries are pooled into sonnenVPP, a virtual power plant that balances supply and demand on the grid like a conventional power plant — cleanly and distributed. This lets individual homes, too small for energy markets alone, collectively buy and sell electricity and support the grid.

The network's promise attracted Shell, which moved to acquire the company in February 2019; founder Ostermann told pv magazine that Shell New Energies would be a 'perfect strategic partner' for internationalizing the business, upscaling production and competing with big battery brands.

Network the batteries into one power plant

Pooling makes thousands of small batteries tradable.

Virtual sharing cuts the need for new grid capacity.

Grid services give members a reason to buy in.

A network layer compounds the value of the hardware.

One battery is too small to matter; thousands, coordinated, become a market participant. If you sell the hardware, the network pooling it into tradable capacity is where value multiplies.

Shell moved to acquire sonnen in February 2019 with the sonnen brand and management retained, and sonnen used the backing to internationalize and upscale production; the community-battery model became a fixture of the residential energy industry's push into virtual power plants.