Piller was delighted to welcome Lower Saxony’s Prime Minister, Stephan Weil (SPD), to the Osterode headquarters and production site to find out more about the company, its workforce and Piller’s latest developments in uninterruptible power supply systems.
The Prime Minister was welcomed by Managing Director Dr. Detlev Seidel and the chairman of the works council, Ingo Schlange.
Following a tour of the production facilities he was interested to see Piller’s innovative products and the challenges they faced with regard to increasing digitalization and the energy transition.
Prime Minster Weil was amazed how the Osterode global player, with almost 1000 employees worldwide, 650 of them at the Osterode and Bilshausen locations, placed such great importance on the manual skills and experience of their employees. Piller has very little automation, no robots, but a rather high level of vertical integration. At Piller, manual work is the ‘be-all and end-all’ Dr. Seidel emphasized. Dr. Seidel also explained how their unique kinetic energy storage system, the POWERBRIDGE™, developed over the last 20 years, can help support the integration of regenerative energy generation systems in stable networks.
In an interview with Prime Minister Weil, Dr. Seidel also addressed the current challenges, including the sharply rising energy and raw material costs, material shortages and the still existing corona restrictions with the resulting bureaucratic obstacles.
Dr. Seidel also emphasized the importance of the South Lower Saxony region, not only for Piller but South Lower Saxony’s other achievements and projects, where they are heavily involved and how they are geared towards medium-sized companies in the region. The promotion of South Lower Saxony as a future region is an important task for the state government.
Prime Minister Stephan Weil (right) and Dr. Detlev Seidel, Managing Director of the Piller Group.
About Piller
Piller was founded in Hamburg, Germany in 1909 by engineer Anton Piller. Employing around 1000 people worldwide, Piller is headquartered in Osterode, near Hanover, Germany, with subsidiaries across Europe, America, Asia and Australia. Piller occupies a unique position, being the only company to produce both types of electrically coupled UPS technologies and with kinetic energy storage or battery options. The company also manufactures aircraft ground power units, 50/60Hz frequency converters, static transfer switches and specialist marine generators. With more than 7000 kinetic energy storage devices and over 6000 high power UPS units installed, Piller has more than 300 service personnel taking care of clients across 24 countries. The Piller group is a wholly owned subsidiary of the multi-disciplined global UK engineering and industrial group, Langley Holdings Plc. In 2016, Piller acquired Active Power Inc., the flywheel energy storage specialist.