Battery Charts is a development of Jan Figgener, Christopher Hecht, and Prof. Dirk Uwe Sauer from the Institutes ISEA and PGS at RWTH Aachen University. With this website, we offer an automated evaluation of battery storage from the public database (MaStR) of the German Federal Network Agency. For simplicity, we divide the battery storage market into home storage (up to 30 kilowatt hours), industrial storage (30 to 1,000 kilowatt hours), and large-scale storage (1,000 kilowatt hours and above).
This page is the supplementary material of the detailed market analysis in our current publication. The graphics and data on this page are licensed under CC BY 4.0 and may be used with credit to the authors and license (see “Citation” tab).
Battery energy
In total, some gigawatt hours of stationary battery storage is reported by now in Germany. The largest share of this is accounted for by home storage, which carries the overall market. Large-scale storage forms the second largest market ahead of industrial storage. For comparison: The national pumped-hydro storage systems have a total energy of 39 gigawatt hours.
Home storage systems are currently mainly used to increase solar self-consumption. Industrial storage systems are primarily used for solar self-consumption as well as peak shaving for businesses or fast charging of electric vehicles. In recent years, large-scale battery storage systems have been built almost exclusively to provide primary control power. Currently, however, three new areas of application are emerging:
- Integration of large PV and wind farms within the innovation auctions
- Grid booster projects for grid operation management
- Optimization of energy management at large industrial sites
Interactive graphic: Click on legend
If the panel failed to load, please click here.
Battery power
Battery storage systems in most cases offer the possibility to be charged or discharged for more than one hour at full power. Therefore, the sum of cumulative storage power is also smaller than the sum of storage energy. The total power is a few gigawatts. The power is distributed roughly in proportion to the storage energy.
Interactive graphic: Click on legend
If the panel failed to load, please click here.
Number of installations
Now, hundreds of thousands of storage systems are registered with the Federal Network Agency. In terms of numbers, these are almost exclusively home storage systems. However, the number of industrial storage systems is also increasing significantly, with few thousand registrations, which can be seen by clicking on the legend. The number of large-scale battery storage systems is way lower. It should be noted that individual registrations with storage energy of over 1,000 kWh are filtered out, as these are often unverified entries in which private individuals mistakenly register storage systems in the megawatt class.
Interactive graphic: Click on legend
If the panel failed to load, please click here.
Addition of batteries
In addition to the cumulative presentation of the storage energy, the monthly additions are also shown. It is easy to see that the trend in new installations is clearly increasing. The current developments of rising electricity prices and the war in Ukraine strengthen the desires for self-sufficiency and for an own PV system including battery storage.
Interactive graphic: Click on legend
If the panel failed to load, please click here.
Battery technologies
At the beginning of the home storage market, lead-acid and lithium-ion batteries had the highest market shares. Over time, however, lithium-ion batteries have clearly gained market shares and have taken up almost the entire market in recent years.
The commercial storage market also features a majority of lithium-ion batteries. It should be noted, however, that systems for uninterruptible power supply are not subject to registration in all cases and lead-acid batteries are still frequently used here.
The variety of technologies in the large-scale storage market was greatest in the early years of the storage market. In addition to lead-acid and lithium-ion batteries, high-temperature and redox-flow batteries also exist here. Today’s new installations, however, are also predominantly lithium-ion based.
Interactive graphic: Click on legend
If the panel failed to load, please click here.
Planned battery storage systems
The MaStR also includes planned battery storage systems in part. The majority is accounted for by large-scale storage systems. This is mainly due to the fact that the smaller home storage systems and industrial storage systems are often not reported until they are installed.
Interactive graphic: Click on legend
If the panel failed to load, please click here.
Regional distribution
The storage systems are distributed throughout Germany. While home storage and industrial storage are aggregated within districts, large-scale storage is presented as individual systems. For home and industrial storage, most of the systems are in the western and southern parts of Germany. On the other hand, the large-scale storage systems do not show a clear distribution.
Methodology
This website visualizes the MaStR data of the German Federal Netword Agency. The data are available under license dl-en/by-2-0 at the website of the German Federal Network Agency https://www.marktstammdatenregister.de/MaStR. The analyses are based on our own evaluations of the published individual registrations, which are performed to the best of our knowledge.
The figures are interactive and can be customized by clicking on the legend (click: single view | click + ctrl: selection of multiple data series). In addition to the selection on this page, there is also a publicly available dashboard (see section) that allows the selection of individual federal states and battery technologies.
The data in MaStR is entered manually by people, which is why we apply certain consistency filters:
- Only entries with energy storage capacity, power and defined battery technology (including “Other”) are considered.
- The charging or discharging time under full load (energy-to-power ratio) must be between 6 minutes and 15 hours.
- Large-scale storage systems may not be operated by private individuals, as there is often confusion between kilowatts and watts and private individuals sometimes falsely state that they have a megawatt-class storage system in the basement. In addition, the grid connection of large-scale storage system to the low voltage is only accepted if the grid operator has already checked the entry.
In our estimation, the completeness of the MaStR is now very high among new installations. Although many battery storage systems were not retroactively registered after operation of the MaStR (concerns installations before 2019), the installations in these years were also not too high. For the new installations, we assume a non-notification rate of a few percent.
We present the battery storage systems by commissioning date and not by registration date. This means that the figures for the last 2-3 months in particular may still change somewhat upwards, as registration does not always take place immediately.