A high level of the security of supply, the uninterrupted operation of system-relevant infrastructure and the maintenance of the country’s competitiveness are essential criteria for safeguarding civil security and depend on the secure and sustainable availability of energy. For this reason, strengthening the resilience of power supply in particular is a declared goal of the German federal government and the EU. In order to guarantee and enhance the complex of „energy security“, the focus is increasingly on emergency power systems, since in exceptional situations and crises neither communication and organization nor food or health supplies can be ensured without electrical energy.

In order to limit the restriction of the ability of companies and authorities to act in the event of a power blackout to a tolerable level, the establishment and operation of a reliable and individual emergency power supply is absolutely essential, since the mobile emergency power generators held in stock by THW and disaster control can neither be installed at short notice nor are available in sufficient numbers. In view of the resource and energy transition, emergency power generators are also not a future-proof technology.
The particularly reliable and durable inorganic flow batteries, whose cell components theoretically do not degrade and which, due to their flexible and individual scalability of capacity and power, can be specifically and thus resource-efficiently adapted to individual storage tasks, represents a promising and suitable alternative storage technology.

In the lecture, the German demand for emergency power storage systems will be derived, the current state of the art and research on electrochemical emergency power storage systems will be presented, and specific requirements for a future universally applicable standard system will be formulated in order to significantly increase the security of supply for companies and public authorities. Using the example of an award-winning design of a self-sufficient flow battery system, the application benefits, possibilities and potentials of such battery systems will be presented.