Siemens Enters Residential Storage Market With Junelight Smart Battery

German industrial giant Siemens announced last week that it was entering the residential battery storage market with the introduction of its new Junelight Smart Battery, which is intended to meet the requirements of private homes generating and storing their own energy.

Already invested in renewable energy generation technologies such as wind, solar, hydro, and biomass — not to mention the utility storage market — Siemens is now expanding its extensive reach into the European residential battery storage market with the launch of its Junelight Smart Battery. Designed to the requirements of self-generated energy and energy storage in private homes, the Junelight Smart Battery coordinates its predictive charging and discharging procedures based on weather-related yield forecasts for the connected solar PV system and the individual consumption profile of the household.

The battery consists of up to six battery units with a net capacity of 3.3 kilowatt-hours (kWh) each and can be retrofitted and flexibly adapted to changes in consumption behavior, providing up to 19.8 kWh of storage at any time. The battery can provide output for use in the home as well as heat pumps and electric vehicle charging and is already equipped with all relevant connections for future functional expansions such as new app features and functions involving intelligent consumption control.

When charging and discharging, the Junelight Smart Battery automatically takes into account user-specific weather and consumption forecasts meaning that the battery is only completely charged in times with high solar PV power dissipation, serving to minimize power losses.

“More and more homeowners are generating their own solar power – and, in light of sinking feed-in tariffs and rising electricity prices, they want to use it completely for their own consumption wherever possible,” said Andreas Matthé, CEO of the Siemens Business Unit Low Voltage & Products. “The Junelight Smart Battery creates the technical basis for future-driven, sustainable and economical energy management within the home. This allows homeowners not only to lower their energy costs, they are also making a substantive contribution towards the success of the energy transition.”

Further, and playing to its “Smart Battery” title, Junelight is paired with a mobile smart app which monitors in real-time all energy flows — from production to storage and all the way down to consumption and grid in-feed.

Siemens entry into the European residential energy storage market highlights the strength of the market.

“In my five things to watch out for in the European energy storage market in 2019 I said the residential sector is simply unstoppable,” said Rory McCarthy, a Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewable Senior Research Analyst, who spoke to me via email. “That was not an overstatement. Europe is home to the biggest residential storage market globally. Already this year we’ve had Shell make a full acquisition of Sonnen [for more, see here], the largest residential storage company in the world. Now we see Siemens, another global behemoth enter the increasingly competitive landscape in Europe with its new residential storage product, also being deployed initially in the home turf of Germany.

“Siemens is already a global leader in the utility storage market with its joint venture with AES; Fluence, launched last year. This new venture focusing on the hugely distributed nature of residential storage will be able to benefit from the global power systems knowledge and experience from Siemens, but in a largely untapped area for the firm; behind residential meters, which will bring a new wealth of challenges to enable a profitable business unit.”

“The activity in the European residential storage market is still far from consolidation, with most players at a VC start up or early technology, immature phase of growth,” McCarthy continued. “However, as we can see so far this year, the bigger players are moving in. The options for market entry for these bigger players is through 1) partnership (most of the market being made up with partnerships between utilities and start ups.  2) acquisition, with success for a lot of the start-ups being acquisition from larger players. 3) develop in-house. I think we will see a lot more of the bigger players making plays into the residential sector in 2019, with the number of acquisitions increasing as the market heats up, and the big names will bring more credibility for this continually underestimated market segment.”

Now available in Germany and set to be launched in Austria in April, the Junelight Smart Battery is already set to receive this years IF Design Award 2019 both for the outstanding design of the hardware and the mobile Smart App.

For more information visit Siemens Junelight page.