Energy Partnership Facilitates Exchange on Energy Storage Standards

On May 18, Chinese and international industry experts, certification and standardization institutes and representatives from academia met at the “Energy Storage International Conference and Expo” (ESIE) in Beijing to discuss energy storage spanning topics such as flywheels, batteries in electric vehicles or large-scale storage for providing ancillary services. At the invitation of the Sino-German Energy Partnership, Mr. Alexander Nollau, Head of Energy at the German VDE Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information technologies, contributed to the forum “Global Energy Storage System Safety & Standardization”.

Within his presentation on “Energy Storage – Player in the Future Energy Eco-System”, Mr. Nollau discussed how energy storage plays an increasingly important role in Germany’s Energiewende – on all levels of the power generation value chain, from balancing intermittent renewables on the generation side to time shifting on the level of electricity consumers. Mr. Nollau then stressed the importance of national and international standardization for enabling the safe and reliable functioning of energy storage technologies and power markets as well as how standards and norms are necessary to facilitate the digitization of the energy landscape. He explained that international standardization cooperation plays a dominant role in the VDE’s standardization work. Already today, approx. 95% of all standards introduced by VDE in Germany were international standards mirrored to the national level. Mr. Nollau concluded his presentation with a case study on the standardization of automotive batteries.

The importance of energy storage technologies for balancing an ever-increasing share of intermittent renewable energies in our electricity systems and fueling the growing number of electric vehicles is growing year by year. Within the last year, China added more than 680 MW of grid-installed electrochemical energy storage capacity – a plus of more than 460%. According to research conducted by the China Energy Storage Alliance (CNESA), today’s total installed battery storage capacity of 1070 MW will nearly twentyfold to 19 GW by 2023.

The Sino-German Energy Partnership serves as an important exchange and cooperation platform for to discuss both countries’ energy transitions on a political, technological and economic level. Since 2018, energy storage and energy storage standards are part of the bilateral cooperation within the Sino-German Working Group “Energy” between the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) and the National Energy Administration of the PR China (NEA). Furthermore, China and Germany cooperate on quality infrastructure and standardization within the Global Project Quality Infrastructure.