“We Provide Stable Grids to the Most Remote Corners of the World”

---

Mr. Roß, how did you make the leap from being a social education specialist to head of a high-tech company?

Com­pared to my co-founder, Erich Bosch, who in my view is the very incar­na­tion of an engi­neer, I def­i­nite­ly have a slight­ly dif­fer­ent back­ground. Orig­i­nal­ly, I worked on a lot of social and urban devel­op­ment projects. I first came into con­tact with the ener­gy sec­tor dur­ing a major project that focused on renew­able ener­gy sup­plies in the Azores.

An island in the arch­i­pel­ago need­ed to be sup­plied sole­ly with solar and wind ener­gy, so it required a bat­tery stor­age sys­tem. As some­one with no tech­ni­cal back­ground, I looked at the prob­lem from all angles to find out what finan­cial and polit­i­cal con­di­tions influ­enced the project and what had to change in order to mar­ket these kinds of projects all over the world. I picked up the tech­ni­cal exper­tise pret­ty much as I went along.

What made you decide to found your own company?

Dur­ing that large project, I noticed that the high price of bat­ter­ies posed a major obsta­cle when it came to financ­ing sys­tems like these and mak­ing them prof­itable. At the same time, it was clear that the con­tin­ued expan­sion of pho­to­voltaics and wind ener­gy was lim­it­ed by fluc­tu­a­tions in the grid.

To over­come these issues, you need to have some kind of stor­age sys­tem that is not only able to bal­ance out con­tin­u­ous fluc­tu­a­tions in the grid but is also able to trans­fer ener­gy from day to night or from windy to calm con­di­tions. With­out this kind of sys­tem, the pro­por­tion of elec­tric­i­ty pro­duced from renew­able sources of ener­gy will remain very low. When we became aware of this sit­u­a­tion, Erich Bosch and I want­ed to ded­i­cate our­selves to stor­age technology—and that’s what led us to estab­lish Autarsys.

We don’t just make soft­ware and devel­op projects—we also cre­ate real-world prod­uct solu­tions in con­tain­er form so that we can bring stor­age tech­nolo­gies to the mar­ket cheap­ly and on a large scale. This is vital, as a major­i­ty of the world’s pop­u­la­tion still has either no access or only lim­it­ed access to elec­tric­i­ty. And this despite the fact that in many devel­op­ing coun­tries the con­di­tions for wind and solar plants are actu­al­ly favor­able. The miss­ing link is a sta­ble pow­er grid that has stor­age capa­bil­i­ties and is also afford­able.

What exactly does your solutionlook like?

The solu­tions we pro­vide are ener­gy stor­age sys­tems (ESS) which take advan­tage of the tech­ni­cal ben­e­fits deliv­ered by the lat­est gen­er­a­tion of lithi­um-ion bat­ter­ies. When demand for ener­gy is low, the ESS can store ener­gy gen­er­at­ed by var­i­ous sys­tems, such as solar plants, wind plants, and diesel gen­er­a­tors, and then release it when demand increas­es. As a result, these sys­tems guar­an­tee a smooth, con­tin­u­ous pow­er sup­ply, act­ing as a buffer between gen­er­at­ing plants and, in off-grid oper­a­tion, tak­ing on the key role of a grid-form­ing pow­er plant, a cen­tral ele­ment which con­trols grid fre­quen­cy and volt­age.

Why have you opted to use GRIDCON® PCS, the modular power conversion system?

The pow­er-con­ver­sion solu­tion from Maschi­nen­fab­rik Rein­hausen acts as a cen­tral, smart net­work-man­age­ment sys­tem. The pow­er con­vert­ers fil­ter things like har­mon­ics, com­pen­sate for reac­tive pow­er, and active­ly bal­ance the load, all of which keeps the volt­age sta­ble in the grid. A sophis­ticated con­trol sys­tem uses struc­tur­al cal­cu­la­tions based on char­ac­ter­is­tic curves to ensure that oper­a­tion remains smooth and works in par­al­lel to the solar plants, wind plants, and diesel gen­er­a­tors that feed in pow­er.

What other advantages are there to using the GRIDCON® PCS?

There are many. First, a key advan­tage for our large solu­tions in par­tic­u­lar is that the sys­tem is built up from an active grid fil­ter that bal­ances out cer­tain fluc­tu­a­tions itself. The GRIDCON® PCS also has a very rapid switch­ing fre­quen­cy, mak­ing it a com­pact pow­er con­vert­er that can be used any­where. In addi­tion, the GRIDCON® PCS is extreme­ly easy to main­tain, as every sin­gle mod­ule is a com­plete pow­er con­vert­er.

When main­te­nance work does need to be car­ried out, this means that we don’t need to fly in a specialist—trained staff at our local part­ners can replace parts or expand the sys­tem them­selves by replac­ing entire mod­ules, even in remote areas. This is some­thing our com­peti­tors can­not offer. In their sys­tems, the pow­er con­vert­er either works as a whole or mal­func­tions com­plete­ly.

Anoth­er ben­e­fit is the DC/DC boost­er, also known as a boost con­vert­er, which is part of the GRIDCON® PCS build­ing for mod­ules from 42 kW to 126 kVA. It solves a prob­lem that occurs fre­quent­ly in cas­es where the ener­gy accu­mu­la­tor is lat­er upgrad­ed, which is that the orig­i­nal bat­tery mod­ules are no longer being made or the man­u­fac­tur­er has changed the spec­i­fi­ca­tions. New bat­ter­ies with dif­fer­ent volt­ages and topolo­gies must be able to work together—so this is where the DC/DC boost­er comes in, as it enables you to inte­grate new bat­ter­ies with­out hav­ing to buy a whole new sys­tem. Expand­ing the sys­tem by adding indi­vid­ual mod­ules pro­vides a fan­tas­tic cost ben­e­fit.

“The pow­er-con­ver­sion solu­tion from Maschi­nen­fab­rik Rein­hausen acts as a cen­tral, smart, net­work-Man­age­ment sys­tem.”

Which applications is your energy storage solution suitable for?

It’s pri­mar­i­ly used in off-grid appli­ca­tions and rur­al elec­tri­fi­ca­tion projects, which involve oper­at­ing inde­pen­dent grids based on pho­to­volta­ic sys­tems in tan­dem with bat­tery sys­tems and ensur­ing they remain sta­ble. We sell stan­dard­ized sys­tems for these appli­ca­tions in order to take advan­tage of the economies of scale that series pro­duc­tion brings.

As a result, we can pro­vide sta­ble and afford­able grids to the most remote cor­ners of the world. The solu­tion is also used in com­mer­cial and indus­tri­al projects. These include facil­i­ties such as cement works or mines that oper­ate beyond the grid and are sup­plied by large diesel gen­er­a­tors, or remote hotels and resorts. In fact, this area includes pret­ty much any facil­i­ty with spe­cial ener­gy sup­ply require­ments that the grid is unable to meet—whether because it’s unre­li­able, sub­ject to fluc­tu­a­tions, or only able to pro­vide ener­gy to a lim­it­ed extent.

We also work in large-scale plants. This area includes what are known as grid ser­vices, the pro­vi­sion of reserve ener­gy, and the bal­anc­ing of fluc­tu­a­tions in solar and wind farms with large pow­er out­puts in the three-fig­ure megawatt range.

“The GRIDCON® PCS allows us to cre­ate intel­li­gent stor­age solu­tions that are com­plete­ly unique in the mar­ket.”

Your idea of providing even remote areas with electricity sounds intriguing. Can you give us an example?

Sure—in the Philip­pines, there is a vil­lage called New Iba­jay, with a pop­ulation of 1,600. A diesel gen­er­a­tor was sup­ply­ing elec­tric­i­ty to 280 homes, two schools, and a small health clin­ic there for four hours a day, and even then, it was very unre­li­able. So we imple­ment­ed our Mini ESS in order to meet the dai­ly demand for 300 kWh in the vil­lage. Now, the community’s devel­op­ment is no longer restrict­ed by an arbi­trary ener­gy lim­it. When a new busi­ness idea leads to increased ener­gy demand, our sys­tem can be eas­i­ly scaled up to pro­vide more ener­gy capac­i­ty while main­tain­ing the same high-qual­i­ty sup­ply.

In terms of growth, what do you have planned for the next few years?

We want to con­tin­ue devel­op­ing in all three of our busi­ness areas and push ahead with new niche devel­op­ments, but they’re not offi­cial yet. We’re also work­ing on how we can improve the effi­cien­cy of our bat­tery man­age­ment sys­tems. How­ev­er, we also want to press ahead with the projects that are more con­crete, of course.

One of the key loca­tions on which we are focus­ing is Mada­gas­car: It’s very sun­ny, the coun­try is one of the poor­est in the world, and the elec­tri­fi­ca­tion rate lies some­where between five and sev­en per­cent. At the same time, there are 16,000 set­tle­ments with no access to elec­tric­i­ty there, so there is a lot of demand. What’s miss­ing is funding—so we are build­ing up our own funds in order to imple­ment these projects effi­cient­ly and on a grand scale. One thing’s for sure, though—projects like this are not going to dry up any time soon.

---

YOUR CONTACT

Do you have any ques­tions about our pow­er-qual­i­ty prod­ucts for ener­gy accu­mu­la­tors?
Andreas Lamert is here to help:
A.Lamert@reinhausen.com