Shell completes sale of home battery maker sonnen to family office Tiven

Shell has completed the sale of sonnen, the German home battery and virtual power plant company it acquired in 2019, to Tiven, a family office investment group headquartered in Malta with offices in Grünwald and Munich. A Shell spokesperson confirmed the completed sale to Energy-Storage.News on August 24, 2026, saying Tiven "will be advised by AURELIUS WaterRise." The outlet reported the exit comes as Shell focuses on "portfolio high-grading efforts." Financial terms were not disclosed.

Neither company initially made a public announcement: German business daily Handelsblatt reported in mid-August that Shell had agreed to sell, and Shell confirmed the completed sale only in response to enquiries, first from Energy-Storage.News and then from pv magazine's ESS News on August 28. As of August 30, sonnen's own press page carries no announcement. Per ESS News' account, Handelsblatt put the purchase price in the low hundreds of millions of euros, citing people familiar with the transaction. ESS News separately states that Shell acquired sonnen for almost €500 million in 2019, a sum undisclosed at the time per Energy-Storage.News; factoring in weak recent results and a 2024 cash injection from Shell that kept the company operating, Handelsblatt described the exit as a billion-euro loss. Handelsblatt also reported that Tiven plans to restructure sonnen and prepare it for resale.

Shell, then Royal Dutch Shell, first invested €60 million in sonnen in 2018 and agreed to acquire the company outright in 2019, per Energy-Storage.News. The same outlet notes that in September 2023 Handelsblatt reported Shell was putting the subsidiary up for sale at a valuation of between €1.35 billion and €1.8 billion, seeking buyers for at least a 51% stake. The model sonnen sells, home batteries aggregated into a virtual power plant, is drawing new money elsewhere: Sunrun agreed in August to supply capacity from a portion of its residential solar-plus-storage systems in PJM and MISO to Voltus's Bring Your Own Capacity programs for AI hyperscalers.