Stormy weather sometimes produces excess or unsafe amounts of power for wind turbines. Northern Germany will soon be home to a gigantic facility that stores that energy and can convert it into heat, which can help power the country's industries. 

North Rhine-Westphalia

Northern Germany is set to host the world's largest energy storage facility. This development comes as a response to the challenges posed by stormy weather that often generates excess or unsafe levels of power from wind turbines. The facility aims to store this surplus energy efficiently and has the capability to convert it into heat.

This innovative approach not only tackles the issue of managing overflow power from wind turbines but also serves as a means to power the country's industries. By converting and utilizing the stored energy as heat, the facility promises to provide a significant boost to industrial operations across Germany. 



Germany building world's largest energy storage facility

When complete, this will be the largest high-temperature energy storage system on the planet. Capacity 20,000 kWh. The steel at the heart of the unit has a number of advantages over conventional batteries. The steel we use for storing energy is available worldwide, and it contains no rare substances and isn't toxic or hazardous either. So there are no extra factors to take into account. The energy, or the electricity to be precise, is harvested via wind turbines. It's used to heat the steel to temperatures of up to 650°C. Heat can, if required, be released to generate steam, which is then used to power machines, for example. In this case right next to the storage facility, at an organic food supplier that is eager to make production more sustainable. It might sound weird needing steam while making frozen goods, but for blanching or peeling vegetables beforehand, we use a steam peeler. And generating steam involves extremely high temperatures. These residential blocks in Berlin have been getting their energy needs from a steel storage system since 2020. The system supplies 400 households with warm water. When converting electrical energy into heat, we have an efficiency rate of over 90%. So it's a very effective method for generating heat from electrical energy and then putting that energy to use. But do these facilities make long-term financial sense? The new supersized one will cost 5 to 7 million euros. Right now in Germany, it would be cheaper to carry on using natural gas to generate steam, which is why the operator sources its own low-price electricity. We want to buy energy directly from a nearby wind farm. We'll also be building a photovoltaic system on top of our new building, which will alone produce some 1.3 megawatts. So our storage unit is ideal for photovoltaic facilities. And if operators don't have their own electricity supply? The steel energy storage concept is only slowly getting off the ground. Although demand in countries with a lot of industry is massive. Steel energy storage facilities could play a key role in countering the climate crisis. Subsidies for green electricity would help to make the technology more established. Although in Germany at least, those subsidies have so far failed to materialize.

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Council of the City of Sydney

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