Coming out of stealth, Switzerland’s Phenogy unveiled its first commercial-scale deployment on Wednesday – marking the largest sodium-ion battery installation in Europe to date.
The single-container system, installed at a commercial site near Bremen Airport in northern Germany, delivers 400 kW of power and offers nearly 1 MWh of storage capacity. It is paired with an existing 50 kW solar array and is currently operating in island mode, optimizing on-site energy consumption while powering electric vehicle chargers.
One of the primary challenges in deploying sodium-ion batteries at scale has been inverter compatibility, due to the broader voltage range compared to conventional lithium-ion systems. This made the choice of inverter technology critically important.
Phenogy integrated eight Sunny Island X 50 inverters from SMA into the 20-foot container. These inverters were designed to support applications beyond the widely used lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry. They have an integrated DC-DC converter, allowing greater flexibility in voltage matching. SMA provided pre-production units of the Sunny Island X 50 to the Bremen site, marking one of the first installations of this new product.
Phenogy says its PHENOGY 1.0 system is designed for a broad range of applications – including industrial, commercial, grid, critical infrastructure, and EV charging – though detailed technical specifications have not been released.
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