The Mobility House brings electric car batteries to the French capacity market

Premiere in France: The technology company The Mobility House has commercialized a storage system in France's electricity market made from first- and second-life Renault ZOE electric car batteries for the first time. The project – Advanced Battery Storage - is being carried out in partnership with Mobilize (Renault Group), Banque des Territoires and The Ecological Transport Modernisation Fund managed by Demeter. Like the storage from vehicle batteries already installed in Germany and the Netherlands, the French storage, which is installed at Renault’s Douai plant in northern France, participates in short-term trading as well as the primary control power market. Douai is thus now becoming an important location: Renault only recently announced plans to build a "gigafactory" or battery factory there. The aim is to support the production of state-of-the-art, cost-competitive and low-carbon batteries to make electrical mobility more accessible in Europe.

With the capacity market, The Mobility House, together with its partners, is opening another source of revenue for electric car batteries and making an important contribution to a stable energy supply. In addition, the company is laying the technological foundation for the grid-friendly and intelligent integration of electric car batteries into the energy system. In the future, mobile storage systems, i.e., electric cars at charging stations, will also make a contribution to grid stability and earn money in the process (also known as vehicle-to-grid / V2G).

For the implementation, The Mobility House relied on the technology, which has been in use since 2016 and is constantly evolving. The intelligent Charging and Energy Management system ChargePilot and its underlying EV Aggregation Platform serve as the basis. It has been specifically designed to efficiently deliver a whole range of energy and power applications, with the ability to integrate a variety of battery packs into the electricity market – whether mobile or stationary, first- or second-life batteries.

Battery storage has already become an essential element in the electricity market to ensure grid stability while enabling an economic energy transition. Particularly the replacement of conventional power plants for important system services, such as primary control power and capacity markets, is a central building block here. Batteries as intermediate storage ensure that conventional power plants can be increasingly dispensed during times of high availability of renewable energies. The Mobility House is a pioneer in technology development for this flexibility, which lies in the intelligently controlled charging and discharging of electric car battery packs.

The storage facility of 4,7 MW at the Renault plant in Douai has been prequalified to participate in the primary control power market with 4 MW. This means that The Mobility House can now provide a total of 33 MW of primary control power with electric car batteries in Germany, the Netherlands and France.