The Used-Battery Gold Rush Is Coming
Last month, Redwood Materials, a company that recycles old EV batteries and builds reused-battery storage systems for data centers, declared that it was working to deploy used batteries from the electric-car maker Rivian at its own manufacturing facilities.
Key points
- Over the past 10 years, the number of Americans with solar panels, who might therefore want a giant battery installed on their property, has soared.
- Andrew Austin, who goes by Battery Man on YouTube, recently filmed himself connecting an old Nissan battery to the solar array at his parents’ U.K.
- Experts on car-battery reuse also are not saying that everybody should hijack their parents’ house and stick an EV battery on the side.
“We literally have hundreds of gigawatts of battery supply driving on our roads today,” says Eddy Chiang, the CEO of Moment Energy, a company that prepares EV batteries for reuse and installs them for clients such as hospitals and airports.
Additional details
- A soccer arena in Amsterdam has a backup power system made of new and used Nissan batteries, as does the city of Melilla, Spain.
- Wearing out an EV battery can take 15 to 20 years, which means that, by the mid-2030s, millions of EV batteries in the U.S.
- In 2017, for instance, a green-energy company installed used batteries from the car manufacturer Renault in U.K.
- (In fact, most of the ones I talked with cautioned against it.) But for the better part of a decade in Europe, whole rafts of EV batteries have been repurposed—with more formal technical and engineering support—to store energy that can power homes, businesses, and factories.
- Connected to a building instead of a car, they can provide power during an outage, relieve strain on the electricity grid, and cut down utility bills by storing cheaper energy to pull from during hours of peak demand.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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