Home battery visionary sold for a loss as oil giant gets out of clean energy

Global oil giant Shell has sold off another of its forays into the clean energy space, this time home battery maker Sonnen for what some are reporting as a billion euro loss. 

The sale, made to Munich-based family office Tiven, could be in the low triple-digit millions, Dealroom reports, significantly lower than the €500 million Shell reportedly paid for the business in 2019, and well below the €2 billion Sonnen was tipped to fetch when Shell put it up for sale in 2023.

Shell has confirmed the sale to Tiven, owned by Aurelius founder Gert Purkert, and it represents a return home to sonnen, which was founded in Germany in 2010.

The deal represents another failure by Shell from its attempts to initially muscle into clean energy and then switch its focus back to fossil fuels.

The oil company promised after the 2019 takeover “to scale up Sonnen’s production five to 10 fold in the next 24 months” and immediately made big promises to the Australian market.

These never materialised, despite Sonnen having set up a factory to make units in Adelaide in 2018 and selling the vision of home battery-plus-electricity before anyone else.

Tellingly, following the 2019 sale announcement then-Sonnen CEO Christoph Ostermann was asked whether he feared Shell would ignore the acquisitions and seek to protect its incumbent fossil fuel interests.

“It’s too late – renewable energy is already competitive today,” Osterman said. 

“Anyone who has an IQ larger than 30 knows that this is not stoppable any more. They can either join or be disrupted. I’d prefer them to join.”

Shell however had a radical change of heart just four years later. The oil major announced in 2023 that it wanted out of the battery company.

Sonnen was left to flounder and it missed the incredible boom in Australian demand created by the federal Cheaper Home Batteries rebate – accompanied by a wave of negative reviews on social media and comparison websites over the last year.

Shell’s foray into clean energy was driven by a very well-publicised push into low-emissions electricity generation and supply and away from transport fuels, through its New Energies division.

Through its so-called “Powering Progress” strategy, Shell aimed to become a global leader in the supply of renewable electric power, targeting sales of around 560 terawatt-hours a year by 2030 to more than 15 million retail and business customers worldwide.

In Australia, this led to the acquisition of ERM Power, an electricity retailer with a dedicated business in providing supplies to commercial and industrial customers.

Shell then bought a 49 per cent stake in solar developer Esco Pacific, to build up a base of cheap green power to underpin contracts with big and small business users.

Shell also chose Australia as the site for its “first ever” foray into solar farm development, with the construction of the 120MW Gangarri project near Wondoan in Queensland’s south west, which started powering up in September 2021.

It still owns this project and is adding a battery. 

And in November 2021, Shell took ownership of online energy retailer Powershop Australia, accelerating its ambition to challenge the country’s legacy energy retailers.

Today, Shell owns a share of an operating battery and has stakes in another five that are being developed, as well as a piece of the Kondinin wind and solar project in Western Australia, according to Renewmap.

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