Shell has sold sonnen, the residential battery storage company it acquired in 2019, as the oil & gas major focuses its attention on “portfolio high-grading efforts.”
Various media outlets had reported from a couple of weeks ago that the British fossil fuels company had agreed to sell sonnen to TIVEN, a family office investment group headquartered in Malta with offices in Grünwald and Munich, Germany.
Shell offered a brief statement to Energy-Storage.news in response to an enquiry yesterday (24 August), confirming the completion of the sale. Financial terms have not been disclosed.
“Shell can confirm it has completed the sale of the sonnen Group to TIVEN, an international asset manager and family office, TIVEN will be advised by AURELIUS WaterRise,” a Shell spokesperson said.
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“We believe TIVEN and AURELIUS WaterRise are well-positioned to support sonnen’s continued development.”
Shell, then known as Royal Dutch Shell, first invested €60 million (at the time ~US$70.23 million) in sonnen in 2018, just under a year before it agreed to acquire the firm for an undisclosed sum.
Sonnen held a leading share of the German residential battery storage market at that time. Meanwhile, Shell was acquiring various distributed energy resources (DERs) companies, including UK power and broadband provider First Utility, aggregator and route-to-market (RTM) trader Limejump and EV company New Motion.
The new ownership would enable sonnen to extend its international reach and bundle related services, sonnen co-founder and then-CEO Christoph Ostermann told Energy-Storage.news in an interview shortly after the acquisition.
Sonnen’s offerings included aggregated virtual power plant (VPP) programmes, which it launched in Germany as early as December 2015. This was just months after Tesla entered the storage market with the Powerwall, bringing broader awareness of battery storage to the mainstream.
While sonnen also launched its US arm, sonnen Inc., in late 2015, due to different regulations regarding electricity markets, it was not until a few years later that the company announced its first US VPP, which is in Utah. Since then, the VPP offering has been the cornerstone of its US branding and expansion efforts.
However, in September 2023, German newspaper Handelsblatt reported that Shell was putting the subsidiary up for sale at a valuation of between €1.35-1.8 billion, seeking buyers willing to take at least a 51% stake.
That process now appears to have reached its end with the TIVEN acquisition. TIVEN is the private investment arm of entrepreneur Gert Purkert, founding partner of global alternative investor AURELIUS. Advisor AURELIUS WaterRise is an operations advisory firm within the group.
“This transaction supports our ongoing portfolio high-grading efforts and reflects our focus on areas of the power value chain where we have differentiated capabilities and can generate the strongest returns over time, including through asset-backed power trading,” the Shell spokesperson told Energy-Storage.news.
AURELIUS and TIVEN declined to comment on the record at the time of publication, responding to a further enquiry from Energy-Storage.news.
