The Volkswagen Group has partnered with MAN Truck & Bus on a pilot project that uses second-life batteries as stationary storage to support the charging of electric buses.

At the bus depot of local transit operator VHH in the Bergedorf quarter of Hamburg, 50 battery packs, which were previously installed in VW Passat GTE plug-in hybrids, have been assembled to form a large virtual battery with a total capacity of 495 kWh. The project partners are testing several different scenarios to optimize power consumption, including cushioning of peak loads when charging electric buses (peak shaving).

“With the peak shaving method, the storage system can reduce up to 600 kW of peak load, and thereby lower the costs when using electricity,” said MAN Truck & Bus spokesperson Alexander Adler.

MAN and VW also hope to learn more about the aging behavior of the batteries, efficient battery management and the life cycles of future battery technologies.

“Battery second use is an extremely important topic in view of the ever-growing electrification of mobility as a whole,” said Stefan Sahlmann, Head of MAN Transport Solutions. “We want to investigate how used batteries behave, so that we are able to develop future applications based on that.”

Verkehrsbetriebe Hamburg-Holstein, which serves over 100 million passengers a year, has a fleet of 560 buses, which are to be converted to electric drive in the coming years.

Source: MAN Truck & Bus