German residential power battery sales to grow strongly - research

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Run-away sales of household power batteries in Germany may continue in 2021, as citizens increasingly choose to employ storage technologies to create a secure, renewable and cost-effective energy supply, industry association BVES said.

Household power battery unit sales could rise by up to 60% from 285,000 recorded at the end of 2020, BVES said on Tuesday while presenting industry-commissioned research.

At the end of 2020, the total number of units, mostly installed in houses with rooftop solar generators, was up by 100,000, or 54%, from a year earlier and nearly ten times that in 2015, presentation slides from advisory group 3Energie Consulting showed.

BVES Managing Director Urban Windelen said householders, typically families with detached houses, had spent time during COVID-19 lockdowns to upgrade their homes so that they can store surplus solar power.

"The drivers for demand are e-mobility and the expansion of photovoltaic power," he said.

There are two million solar photovoltaic systems gradually coming out of fixed 20-year subsidy schemes for output, which prior to the arrival of battery technology was fed into the public grid.

With falling prices of battery systems, there is great market potential for storage and home-use, said Windelen.

Overall sales by the storage industry represented by BVES rose 12.7% last year to 7.1 billion euros ($8.47 billion), and may rise by another 7% in 2021, 3Enerige estimated.

Leading battery vendors in Germany include sonnen, owned by Shell, and Solarwatt.

Home storage batteries accounted for 3.5 billion euros of the total turnover, which also included pumped storage plants and grid size batteries to help power stations and industrial energy consumers regulate power supply flows.

(Reporting by Vera Eckert, Editing by Subhranshu Sahu)