Daimler, through its subsidiary Mercedes-Benz Energy and with partners, is turning a coal power plant into a large energy storage facility using over a thousand modules from its electric car battery packs.

Like Tesla and its ‘Tesla Energy’ division, Mercedes-Benz is leveraging its experience with battery packs for electric cars into making stationary energy storage projects.

They created a ‘Mercedes-Benz Energy’ subsidiary and launched several projects.

One of them was a residential battery pack to compete with Tesla’s Powerwall.

Earlier this year, the company killed the project after admitting that their product was too expensive and overengineered for its application.

While they got out of the residential market, they are still going strong with bigger-scale projects.

Their latest project was unveiled today and it consists of a 8.96 MW/9.8 MWh project using a total of 1,920 battery modules installed in Elverlingsen on the site of the former coal-fired power station that was built in 1912 and recently shut down – pictured above.

Daimler said about the site of the project:

“The large storage plant is therefore a symbol for the transformation in the storage and use of energy – away from fossil electricity grid supply and towards a sustainable extension of the e-mobility value chain that reduces CO 2 .”

The battery modules would have normally found their ways into about 600 third generation electric smarts.

The project is going to be used for primary balancing power on the German grid, which has added a significant amount of renewable energy in recent years.

Solar and wind energy generation is intermittent and therefore, energy storage capacity can be used to store the energy when it’s being produced in excess and not needed immediately and release it when energy production is lower but demand is higher.

This project was completed in partnership with ENERGIE and The Mobility House.

It follows several other large-scale energy storage projects from Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz Energy division.

Last year, they completed a similar but bigger 17.4 MWh facility in Herrenhausen.

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