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The first 100% green grid is online, figuratively speaking. Philip Hiersemenzel of Younicos said there is no such thing as a Mecklenberg grid (the part of Germany in question), only a European continental grid that stretches from Poland to Portugal, from the northern tip of Denmark to Sicily/Greece. Mecklenburg is already 100% renewable on paper but, without storage, up until recently now most of that electricity had to be exported. This changed four months ago when the 5 MWh battery pack at Schwerin started a “trial run.” Today – September 16, 2014 – it is officially “online.”

One of the major obstacles to Germany’s going “green” has been the necessity of using conventional power plants to back up intermittent renewable energy sources. They have been blocking the grid!

As Hiersemenzel explains,

“To be able to adjust their power just a little up and down, these plants have to run at something like 70% of capacity. In fact a typical coal fired power plant runs at 90% in order to adjust 2% up and down. The remainder of the power thus produced has to be absorbed by the grid and thus blocks space for renewable generation. In Germany we have about 25 Gigawatts of such so-called “must-run” capacity. With an average load of 60 and a low of 45 GW that means that in times of low load everything above 20GW of renewable generation has to be powered down or exported. Thermal plants, of course, produce CO2 to do this.”

Younicos’ solution was to replace the fossil fuel back-up with large scale batteries.

They built the 5 MW/MWh battery power plant in the Schwerin district of Lankow for WEMAG. It houses 1600 battery trays containing 25,600 lithium-manganese-oxide cells that can store and release energy within milliseconds.