SPD state leader Florian von Brunn calls for the construction of large battery storage systems at the previous locations of nuclear power plants in Bavaria – and accuses the state government of inactivity in this area as well. “Today, battery storage with many hundreds of megawatts of power is possible. I want such storage as soon as possible in the Free State,” said the SPD’s top candidate in the state parliament of the German Press Agency in Munich. Bavaria must be the leader here.
“Then we can, for example, store the solar power if we produce too much. And we can use it again in the evening to supply the economy and households,” argued von Brunn. That is much better than curtailing it – as is often the case in summer. The SPD politician suggested the previous nuclear power plant locations as “ideal” locations. “There’s not just space here. The biggest advantage in Gundremmingen and Isar II is that we already have the grid connections and the necessary transmission capacity there.” The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems established this last year. “Unfortunately nothing happened in Bavaria.” Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) and Economics Minister Hubert Aiwanger (Free Voters) are apparently more concerned with praising the situation. “But that endangers jobs. We have to act instead of just talking.”
Other states are much further along
So far, the Free State has been lagging behind in the construction of large battery storage systems due to the “inactivity” of the CSU and Free Voters. “Unfortunately, other federal states are much further along,” said Brunn. In North Rhine-Westphalia, the power company RWE has just put a mega battery into operation that has several times the capacity of the largest Bavarian energy storage system. And Saxony is already further along. “After our large power lines were unfortunately blocked for a long time, we have to act now,” von Brunn demanded. With a “Big Battery” with an output of 400 megawatts and a storage capacity of 800 megawatt hours, 100,000 four-person households could be supplied with electricity for 24 hours, von Brunn calculated. “These are really sensible investments that we in Bavaria absolutely have to support.”
So far there has been no funding for large battery storage systems in Bavaria, he criticized. That must be changed as soon as possible. The minimum are low-interest loans or guarantees. Aiwanger recently put two new battery storage systems into operation for the Free State, in the Neustadt an der Aisch district and in the Kitzingen district. According to the ministry, these offer a total output of 42 megawatts and have a storage volume of 48 megawatt hours.