Battery

Where does the energy go that the sun and wind generate too much of during the day? And where does the energy come from in the evening when the hairdryer and TV are switched on? Decarbonizing our grids poses a major challenge, as conventional electricity grids are designed to operate at a certain frequency. Grids with a high proportion of wind and solar energy are susceptible to sudden fluctuations in the power supply. Decentralized energy storage close to the energy production and energy consumption therefore is a major area of research in the transition to a fossil-free energy supply.

What does the district battery look like, which stores surplus electricity during the day and supplies a neighborhood‘s households with self-sufficient energy in the evening hours? In order to make the battery tangible for the neighborhood in everyday life, to give a loving look at the technology behind the energy storage and to stimulate the discourse on alternative technology solutions, a public use moves in: a venue that can serve the neighborhood as a theater, cinema and concert space. The spaciousness of the existing building on the site offers the ideal conditions for such public use. The core idea of the conversion is to allow only those functions to move into the existing building that can be accommodated without major structural changes and to relocate all those uses with more complex spatial or technical requirements, such as the theater bistro with kitchen and rest rooms, to the new building being constructed next door. The courtyard between them two is the theater foyer. The system behind the energy storage consists of a cylinder filled with water, in which a heavy load piston is raised with surplus electricity to store energy and lowered to recovers the energy via a turbine. „When your house [...] contains so many services that the hardware could stand up by itself without any assistance from the house, why have a house to hold it up?” This question from Reyner Banham's article "A Home is not a House" leads to the decision to hang the whole building from the four energy storage units. A typology of dwelling wraps around this primary structure, which benefits from the tempering mass of the water. Windows on each floor allow the residents and the neighborhood to follow the level of energy stored during the day. Like a kind of strange running clock.