Future Power at Wattkraft: two days of storage practice in Bad Soden-Salmünster

The event. 96 participants — installers, planners, investors — for two days at the Birkenhof Hotel in Bad Soden-Salmünster. Day one belonged to commercial systems: fundamentals and options of the current Huawei FusionSolar systems, battery storage, charging infrastructure. Day two to the large plants: utility-scale systems and high-power battery storage.¹ Wattkraft is a distributor for Huawei FusionSolar and one of our partners for this technology; we were invited and we went.

At the Biebergemünd supply centre. On the afternoon of day one: a commercial storage system with DC charging infrastructure in live operation, built by AHS Solar.¹ A behind-the-meter plant of the kind we develop for industrial sites — with the difference that here fast chargers hang on the same connection and the storage buffers them.

In the solar park. On day two, a solar park built by AHS Solar: 27.4 MWp of photovoltaics and ten battery storage units with 4.5 MWh each.¹ The storage charges from the photovoltaics and from the grid — green power and grey power, depending on what the market calls for. And the substation is close by. That is not a detail: at this scale the grid connection decides cost and schedule more than the choice of cell.

Two sizes, two jobs. The park has two classes: the containers with 4.5 MWh each, which work on the power market — and a row of Huawei LUNA2000-241-2S1 cabinets with 241 kWh each,² which cover the plant's own consumption. For us that is not a contradiction but the normal case: which size fits is decided by the site — the connection, the load profile, the business model. Whether grid-scale storage or storage behind the meter: that is exactly where we start.

Why we go. A datasheet says what a system can do. A plant in operation shows how it was built — foundations, cable routes, clearances, the space for maintenance. Anyone who develops projects learns faster from other people's plants than from their own mistakes. That is why we accept such invitations.