…Redwood believes that by 2030, end-of-life batteries could supply more than 50 percent of the entire energy storage market. Instead of grinding up used batteries to reclaim the critical materials inside, put them to work storing electricity. There have been many experiments done that re-purpose used EV batteries which no longer can supply enough power to meet the need for rapid acceleration in an EV but still have up to 80 percent of their original energy storage capacity available…
…Traditional energy storage systems are high density and require heavy-duty cooling. To avoid this, Redwood’s team opted for an open-air, low-density system mounted on above-ground cable trays.
Spreading packs out in the open air helps avoid the need for active refrigeration, and stripping away moving parts like fans and filters minimizes potential reliability failures. Keeping the wiring above ground and limiting the size of each modular component minimizes the need for large equipment. As Sun explained, the result is a storage system that is faster to build, easier to inspect after storms, and cheaper to keep running over time…
One thing to keep in mind is that the car may outlast the battery, by a fair amount.
If you look at Prius, there’s been a fair amount of battery replacement there. I vaguely recall seeing that first gen Nissan Leaf batteries degraded enough to need replacement fairly quickly. On the flip side, seems the more carefully managed solutions with liquid cooling and maintaining buffers have been more robust than expected.
Still, I ultimately agree with the assessment that the volumes aren’t going to be there for a long time, just that batteries coming out can happen before the car is scrapped. But in terms of volumes, prior to 2019 there just weren’t enough batteries going to be expecting much either way yet.
But isn’t this exactly the thing the article is talking about? Using the degraded batteries that are no longer fit enough to be used in cars, but might still have 60-70 % capacity and be well suited for slow charging and stationary energy storage.
So far car batteries are mostly lasting except for the Leaf which has a known bad design. Everyone else has put in proper thermo management, and so while batteries have degraded a bit over time, the cars are generally considered perfectly usable. I’m sure there are exceptions, but in general there isn’t demand for battery related repairs in EVs. Only time will tell of course.
Yes, I’m just unsure when the volumes hit.
Evidently they do seem to indicate a battery intake rate consistent with about 250,000 EV batteries a year.
Globally about 30 million cars are junked a year, so as EV adoption raises then they could reasonably get 8 fold more batteries even while splitting with other companies.
But they have a chokepoint that means they can only use a fraction of the batteries they get already, so more batteries won’t help them right now.
Hasn’t the Prius also generally used NiMh batteries rather than the Lithium-based chemistries?
Maybe, but that isn’t clear. Like I said, I don’t have fuel source statistics, even though that is important. I suspect it is too early to gather those statistics.
The Prius has some battery replacement, but my impression is most of them the battery lasts for life, only in a few cases is it seen as worth it to replace a battery (or just a dead cell?). EVs have not been around long enough to really develop this industry - if it ever will develop.
The leaf is an outlier - their battery management system was poor and it killed the battery in ways that nearly every other make avoids. The leaf sold in enough numbers, long enough ago, that I’d expect to see an industry to replace the battery if one will happen and it doesn’t seem to be as large as one should expect. This is a sign of something - but what it is too early to tell.
They discuss this in the article. Used batteries are not their bottleneck, at least for this company. The issue is incorporating all the different designs/chemistry’s/states safely: