What’s being described as Europe’s largest electric car charging park will be kitted out with 2MWh of stationary battery storage systems from Tesvolt, charged with “green energy from the grid”.

From both a technical and economic point of view, it makes sense to deploy battery energy storage at facilities that can charge multiple electric vehicles (EVs), Tesvolt CTO and co-founder Simon Schandert told Energy-Storage.news this morning.

“Charging electric vehicles results in high peak loads. These are usually expensive, as they require utility companies to keep more energy available in the grid. Energy customers who cover their peak loads using a storage system instead can save a lot of money,” Schandert said.

The charging park is being built at the site of an organic bakery at Kreuz Hilden junction, which connects two motorways in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Multiple providers are setting up a total of 114 charging points, including fast chargers: 40 V3 Tesla Superchargers and 22 Fastned fast chargers adding up to 350kW, alongside eight public charging stations which will add up to 22kW of load. Meanwhile the remaining 44 charge stations will be used by the employees and clients of park owner, enterprising baker Roland Schuren.

A 700kW rooftop solar PV array will be used to charge every one of the stations, while two small wind power installations will help deal with those peak loads. The Tesvolt battery systems will be used to store the energy generated from the renewable energy facilities. It's the latest such project to demonstrate the close synergies between the electric vehicle space and stationary energy storage.

“The charging stations can draw solar power directly from the on-site PV installation or from the connected storage system, which is also charged with green energy from the grid at times when prices are low,” Tesvolt’s Simon Schandaert said.

“At the same time, storage systems allow users to avoid high electricity connection costs. If the output of local utility companies is insufficient, the storage system can simply make up the difference.”