Ideal Power to enter German storage market with PCS order

The order comes off the back of a demonstration project at a commercial facility in Germany that used Ideal Power’s PCS. Credit: Ideal Power
Power conversion specialist Ideal Power has received an order for 0.5MW of its 30kW power conversion systems (PCS) for commercial energy storage projects in Germany, from an unnamed customer or customers.

The order comes off the back of a demonstration project at a commercial facility in Germany that used Ideal Power’s PCS, which is based on its Power Packet Switching Architecture (PPSA). Ideal Power claims that its PCS systems are smaller, lighter and have greater efficiency than traditional technologies.

They are also software configurable, allowing operation in 50Hz or 60Hz environments, which helps deployment in a wide range of markets including solar PV, variable frequency drives, battery energy storage, mobile power, microgrids and electric vehicle charging. The lower size also reduces installation costs, the company claims.

Dan Brdar, chief executive of Ideal Power, said: "We are pleased to expand into Germany, which has a mature residential storage market and burgeoning demand for commercial and industrial (C&I) storage. The pilot commercial installation was a successful case study and shows that our products combined with distributed energy storage have value beyond the US demand charge application."

The German energy storage market will be worth US$1.03 billion by 2021, representing an 11-fold jump on its 2015 market value in megawatt terms, according to a report by US analyst GTM Research in July.

Ideal Power is also developing a bi-directional, bipolar junction transistor (B-TRAN) which has the potential to dramatically increase bi-directional power switching efficiency and power density.

Over the summer, German energy storage hardware and services provider sonnen also launched a new product for the commercial energy storage market using power conversion systems from Ideal Power.