Hager Energy

Hager Energy: Poised to sit at the heart of the energy transition

Combining E3/DC and our Hager energy management systems under the roof of our new Hager Energy business unit means we’re ready to take on one of the greatest challenges of the energy transition: storage and distribution of renewables.

Rising to the challenge

The problem:

Global warming. Temperatures on our planets are rising due to CO2 emissions. We must curb our greenhouse gas emissions to make a future on Earth possible. Innovative and bold approaches are called for.

The causes:

Apart from agriculture, by far the most emissions are caused by transport and buildings (residential and commercial). We need energy to heat our homes and offices, to run our appliances, to heat our water. We need energy to power our cars and lorries. We need energy to run industrial sites in which we produce the goods we want to consume. All of this causes harmful emissions, unless the energy originates from renewable sources.

Renewables, however, have one fatal flaw: they are not as reliable as the fuel sources – fossil and nuclear - which have dominated our energy landscape over the past century. The sun doesn’t shine 24/7 and the wind doesn’t blow day and night. Then again, there’s way too much wind or sun, causing dangerous surges in the grid which can lead to outages.

Smart energy management

The solution:

Storage. Storing renewable power when it’s being produced and keeping it for when it’s needed. This is possible with smart and revolutionary energy management. At Hager Group, we offer a wide range of energy management systems. With our new Hager Energy Business Unit, we intend to position ourselves at the heart of an energy transition which works.

Our broad energy management offer such as Electrical Vehicle Charging Stations (EVCS), energy storage and energy management controlling includes all the components necessary to make the transition away from fossils to renewables more than a distant vision.

Towards a decentralised grid

The way power is produced has been changing for a while. In Germany alone, we have shifted from about 70 central power stations feeding the grid to over 2m individual prosumers i.e. consumers which produce their own electricity. Solar panels on roofs generate electricity which can be used to run the house and to fuel the EV.

Combining the storage possibilities contained both in the house and the car is a breakthrough technology known as bidirectional charging. Since a vehicle battery can store about as much energy as an average household consumes in a week, bidirectional charging offers a massive opportunity for everyone who lives in a building and drives a car. Which is just about every one of us.

E3/DC is developing smart home energy systems which include bidirectional charging. Our smart home power stations are ready for this technology with the appropriate interface. In fact, E3/DC has spent years perfecting the necessary basic technology for this in the photovoltaic home power station. In a nutshell, this means being able to feed the car battery from your home systems and vice versa. Surplus energy produced by solar panels can be stored in your car battery and fed back into the home system when needed. Like this, each EV becomes a mini mobile storage unit, serving not only to power your house when needed but also able to stabilize the grid in times of overproduction.

And how does this all work?

Granted: There's a lot of technology involved here. That’s why, together with our colleagues from Audi, we have created a super easy-to-understand video. Watch it and you’ll get it.

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Cutting edge technology

All of this depends on highly sophisticated systems talking to each other and our key challenge is to master charging software technology for Hager Group EVCS products worldwide. We are well on our way, having run a successful project with Audi in 2020, using a specially designed e-tron model. We have shown our technology to work and are now scaling our production and sales capabilities.

Going forward, Hager Energy CEO Dr. Andreas Piepenbrink and COO Rémy Becher are confident we’ll be seeing Hager Group as a central player in an energy transition designed to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions.