Who knew that bakers would be major drivers of the electromobility revolution? Mexican bakery giant Bimbo is building its own electric delivery vans, and now we learn that German organic baker Roland Schüren is building what’s billed as Europe’s largest electric car charging park.
The bakery’s charging facility is located at the busy Kreuz Hilden motorway junction, near Düsseldorf in northern Germany. It currently features 15 charging stations, including Type 2, CCS and CHAdeMO chargers. While waiting for their cars to charge, drivers can eat at the on-site café. Local EV owners meet every Saturday morning for breakfast and charging.
Plans call for the Seed & Greet charging park to be expanded to a total of 114 charging stations, including 40 V3 Tesla Superchargers and 22 fast charging stations (up to 350 kW) from Dutch supplier Fastned. The chargers will be supplied with 100 percent green power, sourced in part from a rooftop photovoltaic installation. The first phase of construction, including about half the charging stations, is to be completed in August.
German commercial and industrial battery storage specialist Tesvolt will supply 2 MWh worth of energy storage for the project. Tesvolt produces storage systems with prismatic battery cells from Samsung SDI, based on a nickel manganese cobalt oxide chemistry.
Tesvolt’s battery storage systems will store energy from the 700 kW photovoltaic installation and two small wind turbines to reduce demand charges associated with peak loads. They will also store green energy from the public grid when it’s inexpensive.
Gregor Hinz, energy consultant and general technical planner for the project, expects that the two storage systems will pay for themselves within just a few years. The life expectancy of the system is approximately 30 years.
Hinz chose Tesvolt for the charging park project because the company’s TPS flex storage container is relatively compact, and is one of the few systems on the market capable of fulfilling the high technical demands. “Of course, it is particularly important that a charging park’s storage systems can be quickly charged and discharged at any time,” says Hinz. “Currently, only a very few storage products on the market are capable of this.”
“We bakers are really feeling the effects of climate change,” says Roland Schüren. “The dry weather over the past few years has made the flour obtained from our organic farmers much harder to process. With the Seed & Greet charging park, I want to show that climate conservation is not only essential for environmental reasons, it also pays off economically.”
Source: Tesvolt