The Allgäu company has expanded its production at its headquarters in Wildpoldsried and is now able to manufacture approximately 120,000 systems per year. Sonnen’s drive to accelerate expansion reflects the sharp increase in demand for solar storage systems in Germany.
Sonnen has expanded its production faster than planned and thus doubled the capacity.
Responding to last year’s explosive demand, the company implemented its expansion to 120,000 PV home storage systems a year earlier than originally planned.
Industry experts expect Sonnen to reach the mark of one million installed solar electricity storage systems already this year. The German Solar Energy Association reports that around 214,000 new battery storage systems were installed in Germany last year. According to RWTH Aachen University, more than 110,000 new solar power storage systems were added in the first quarter alone.
As demand grows, Sonnen grows. The number of employees has almost doubled from 800 to 1,500 from the beginning of 2022. About 450 of them work at the company’s headquarters in Wildpoldsried, located in the Allgäu region of southern Germany. Sonnen has also expanded its development center there and added a new training center on site.
“Last year, we experienced an unprecedented increase in demand, which we were not able to fully cover despite our production facility, which was not inaugurated until 2021,” says Sonnen CEO Oliver Koch. “But even if the demand for home storage systems normalizes again, it will remain at a high level.”
With the early expansion of production capacity, Sonnen is able to reliably serve the demand of other markets as well. “With our virtual power plant technology, we extend the added value beyond storage and thus ensure critical competence for the digital energy transition in Germany as an industrial and technological location,” said Koch.
Sonnen connects its solar electricity storage systems to a virtual power plant and offers them on the balance electricity market for frequency services, among other things, and allows the battery systems to contribute to the stability of the grid – a task that is still mainly the task of traditional power plants. or large warehouses. Households that have installed home storage systems gain additional income opportunities. Recently, Sonnen has also included electric cars in his virtual power plant.
