Rolls Royce Power Systems— wholly owned by the luxury car maker Rolls Royce— is opening a battery energy storage system factory in Bavaria, Germany.
From next year, the firm’s MTU EnergyPacks will be made at the Siemens-Technopark in Ruhstorf, site—where Rolls-Royce already has a production site.
Rolls Royce said the move was to expand production, with their set up having the abilty to build 30-40 MTU units a year depending on the size of the unit (large or small).
The units use cells from Samsung and are designed for grid support and to allow greater penetration of renewable power onto the grid.
The systems will be sold globally, but Rolls Royce sees the US as big market and Asia/Pacific as the fastest growing market.
Rolls Royce plans to rebuild three former factory halls of Siemens AG to allow the fitting of battery modules to 40-ft containers, with subsequent testing, from early 2021.
The facilities will also include a showroom for customers, a warehouse, offices and adjoining rooms.
The expansion of the production site is to form part of Rolls-Royce’s new Microgrid Solutions division, established by Rolls-Royce at the beginning of the year when it acquired a majority stake in the Berlin-based energy storage specialist Qinous, now operating under the name Rolls-Royce Solutions Berlin.
Rolls Royce’s MTU EnergyPacks are currently produced in Ruhstorf at Rolls-Royce subsidiary MTU Onsite Energy Systems.
Besides lithium-ion batteries, the MTU EnergyPack container houses an electronic control unit, transformers, and cooling equipment to form a complete energy storage solution.
MTU EnergyPacks are already in service around the world – close to home in eastern Germany for example, where they store the electrical power produced by solar parks, as well as further afield in Costa Rica or the Seychelles.
Last November, Rolls-Royce commissioned its Microgrid Validation Center at the headquarters of its Rolls-Royce Power Systems subsidiary in Friedrichshafen, Germany.
