Like many German consumers, Christine Lacher, a nurse, and her husband, Reinhard, a factory supervisor, are careful when it comes to energy use. They have invested thousands of euros to build their dream home with plenty of energy-saving and generating equipment. They believe that their investment will be worthwhile in the long run as being more independent will buffer them from the stiff increases in electric bills from Germany’s large utilities.
A big chunk of the Lachers’ investment went for a battery supplied by a company based in this Alpine village. The company, Sonnen, is a small enterprise with big ambitions. It started out supplying batteries, but it wants to parlay its skills in storing and digitally managing electricity to challenge and even supplant the giant utilities.
Sonnen has set up what it calls a community of around 10,000 households like the Lachers, who effectively obtain electricity they need from each other through the company’s trading system. For a monthly fee of 20 Euros, its customers can rely on their community rather than the major utilities for their power.
Sonnen also helps customers to reduce or even break their links with utilities. It provides customers with batteries, and control to manage and use whenever needed. Sonnen does not make the batteries, but it says it winnows the market for the best available devices in terms of reliability and safety.
In Germany, Sonnen is tapping into an ethos of energy independence enabled by the growth of renewables and other breakthroughs. Renewables as power sources have characteristics that are quite different from the giant natural gas, coal and nuclear plants owned by the large utilities. Smaller and scattered around the country, renewable power installations, tend to be owned by small investors like the Lachers. Renewables also drive down the prices generators receive, helping to turn electricity into a low-margin commodity.
The emergence of renewables is reshaping the relationship between consumers and energy providers. Empowered by the availability of new electricity sources and options from emerging digital technology, results in energy providers, once almost unassailable incumbents, being forced to win their “right in the marketplace of the future,” said Jöorg Stäglich, a partner in the energy practice at Oliver Wyman.
Analysts say that Sonnen has a reasonable chance to thrive in the electricity market of the future because it already has a substantial customer base for its battery systems.
Above all, Sonnen aspires to fill a need that has been created by the abundance of renewables: storing their excess power and saving it for an opportune time.
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Source: The New York Times, 17 October 2017