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29th June 2016 

Intersolar/EES 2016 - Part 1: Automotive Industry at the Intersolar

Last week the 25th Intersolar 2016 took place in Munich and as a part of it the EES, the Electrical Energy Storage fair and conference. This series of posts will share the individual impressions and findings of three busy days mainly in the EES hall besides the five other halls of Intersolar.

We all know that there is a direct link between e-mobility and electrical storage by batteries. This is known by a broad public latest since Elon Musk presented the Tesla Powerwall in April 2015 in a very well staged presentation. (An interesting analysis of Elon Musk’s style of presentation can be found here.) However, nobody was surprised to see Tesla Powerwall at the Intersolar.

Of course it does not only make sense for Tesla to take advantage of the synergies between e-mobility and batteries for the storage markets. There were more well-known players from the automotive industry present at the Intersolar and EES fair. Here are the ones which I noticed:

·         Accumotive/Mercedes: Accumotive, 100% owned by Daimler, was found in the first place to provide battery systems for e-mobility. Meanwhile Daimler founded the Mercedes-Benz Energy GmbH to commercialise the home storage systems produced by Accumotive. Interestingly I learned at the booth at the EES that the battery cells used in the home storage system produced by Accumotive and sold by Merceds-Benz Energy are the cells which were produced by Li-Tec, 100% owned by Daimler, until end of 2015. After Li-Tec stopped the production of the cells it offered the production line for sale. It was not yet published who would supply the cells for the Mercedes-Benz Energy home storage when all Li-Tec cells are used and whether then the home storage would be still fully “made in Germany”.

·         SolarWatt/BWM: Stefan Quandt is 90% shareholder of SolarWatt while at the same time he and his older sister Susanne Klatten hold almost 50% of BMW’s shares. The Quandt siblings are known for strategic investments related to the future of BMW. Exemplary was the investment from Susanne Klatten in SGL Carbon, a supplier of products from carbon, especially new carbon fibers for automotive industry. This means that SolarWatt was saved by Stefan Quandt from insolvency a few years ago with the obvious target to connect BMW’s activities in e-mobility with SolarWatt’s acitivities in home storage.

·         Eaton/Nissan: Eaton is a supplier of power management solutions including UPS Backup power systems. Nissan is an automobile company which has as well an electric car with an own battery system. Eaton and Nissan co-operate to allow for cost effective home storage systems from Eaton by reusing battery systems form Nissan electric cars as second life batteries.

·         Kreisel Electric: Kreisel is an innovative supplier for solutions for e-mobility from Austria. At Kreisel’s booth at the Intersolar/EES showed a Porsche Panamera which Kreisler had converted from the old vehicle with a combustion engine to a full electric car with Li-Ion Batteries. Additionally to this Kreisel presented the very new energy home storage system “Mavero” which is based on the battery system and experience developed for electric vehicles.

This is the first post about our own impressions from the Intersolar and EES in Munich from 22 nd to 24 th June 2016. Look out for the next post of this series.