Used EV car batteries find new life storing solar power in California As researchers continue to debate the merits of turning old electric vehicle batteries into energy storage for renewables like solar and wind, a California startup says it has already built out a facility to do just that. B2U Storage Solutions has reportedly deployed more than 1,300 used EV batteries at a solar facility in …
"According to their research, using EV batteries as home energy storage could reduce the costs of home solar systems by as much as 50 percent and, more crucially, keep all that valuable lithium and nickel (and toxic battery byproducts) out of landfills."
If the lithium and nickel are valuable (which they are), why would they be in landfill?
Relatedly, is this a better use of those metals than recycling into new vehicle batteries? Alas I studied CS rather than electro-chemistry, but I've always assumed that reduced Li-ion battery capacity is associated with degraded efficiency because of increased resistance at one or both of the anode and cathode.
-A.
Generally speaking, valuable things end up in landfill because the cost of recycling is greater than the value of the extracted materials.
Bingo! We got there in the end.
Batteries are horrible to recycle and that situation is not going to change any time soon, regardless of how many pie in the sky startups come along claiming to have "solved" the problem of dud EV powerplants.
Consumers aren't disposing of EV battery packs themselves, that happens in some sort of authorized service center or an automotive junkyard if the vehicle is too old/damaged to get a new battery.
No one is sending entire gasoline powered cars to a landfill, catalytic converter and all. Similarly, no one is going to send battery packs to a landfill so long as it is economic to recycle them for such materials or there are laws similar to the laws regarding disposal of used engine oil that require recycling to recover the useful materials.
No one is sending entire gasoline powered cars to a landfill, catalytic converter and all. Similarly, no one is going to send battery packs to a landfill so long as it is economic to recycle them for such materials or there are laws similar to the laws regarding disposal of used engine oil that require recycling to recover the useful materials.
That's the point of scams like this. It just kicks the can down the road. Recyling all the Tesla batteries that have previously been produced is a collosal future cost/liability, especially given battery packs can't currently be recycled back to re-usable elements. So instead the industry promotes scams like this, which pushes the liability for disposal onto ventures like this, and ultimately the sucker at the end of the line who ends up with a pile of unusuable batteries.
"which pushes the liability for disposal onto ventures like this"
Unfortunately very true. This also doesn't fix the issue of packs that have suffered some sort of internal failure. Many battery packs are also now glued together so any sort of service or repair is near impossible. The only option is to go into the crusher and be recovered as a mush of raw materials.
This method of re-use isn't a bad idea but I'd hazard a guess that most of the packs are coming from crash damaged cars or cars otherwise deemed beyond economical repair. Unlikely to be 'end of life' cars. Also car manufacturers are changing their packs every couple of years as new cells come to the market.
"If the lithium and nickel are valuable (which they are), why would they be in landfill?"
It's the usual short-sightedness plus expediency, deceit, and green-washing
I understand that plastic recycling suffers the same kind of fate. That is, when I dutifully put plastic in the blue can I assume (in good faith) that Mr. Gummint is also following through and turning these plastic throwaways into more plastic at some recycling plant somewhere.
Unfortunately that often means a landfill in someone else's back yard, possibly in a 3rd world country, who might decide to put it in a barge and dump it at sea instead [and they DO].
Battery recycling *IS* what we all want. But for SOME reason it is NOT what we get!!!
Usually I laugh at this and point fingers at the hypocrisy, but right now i am too saddened by it all. WE THE PEOPLE suffer from it, while virtue signalling elitists say "Nothing to see here"
Of course re-purposing battery assemblies for a few more years [as peak electrical demand storage] IS good so let's keep doing that.
(and do not forget that the energy density of GASOLINE, by weight, is considerably better than a battery pack - and there is no man-made CO2 climate change, either)
Problem is that it's been easier to just build batteries and 'worry' about the recycling later. Of course, as Tesla & Co now ramp up production, it finally dawns on everyone that the recycling part is sorely needed, and needed soon. The amount of NiCd and NiMH batteries in landfill is obscene and almost criminal. The same goes for lithium batteries of all shapes and sizes.
There are some small companies (some started by ex-Tesla engineers, some not) that are pioneering in the actual recycling (i.e. disassemble, take the electrolyte and the materials, clean them, shred them, recycle them, send them back to the big battery manufacturers), although this company seems to look at it differently, i.e. squeezing that battery until the last dribbles of energy are out, before sending them to be recycled.
"although this company seems to look at it differently, i.e. squeezing that battery until the last dribbles of energy are out, before sending them to be recycled."
That's been how LI batteries have been seen across their lifetime. The article wasn't written very well. EV's haven't been around all that long so there aren't scores of battery packs to be recycled. The Tesla Model S came out in 2012, just 11 years ago and the nominal life of an EV battery pack is expected to come in at around 10 years in the car. That 10 years isn't cast in stone as some Model S owners don't have issues with the state of their batteries if they haven't lived a hard life of being driven hard and put up hot.
Tesla is one for gluing their packs together, but other manufacturers don't. It shouldn't be allowed so battery cells can be extracted and recycled or the packs rebuilt. Trying to dig out a gob of silastic material to replace a dud cell can be dangerous.
Anybody that's worried about EV battery packs going to landfill shouldn't lose any sleep. Try to find one. They aren't cheap and get snapped up quickly when they come up for sale. Many companies that convert older cars to electric drive trains buy up the older modular Tesla battery packs to reuse. The newer Tesla packs are almost useless as they can be siliconed into one big lump that isn't easy to repurpose. Ford had and electric Ranger pickup in 1998/9 and while not many were made, there was a company that would change them over to Li batteries rather than LA or NiMh that they originally had and packs from later EV's supplied the cells.
A 60kWh pack that's lost a 1/3 of its capacity sucks in a car, but 40kWh is still a bunch of power. It will run a house for a number of days or longer with a bit of conservation. I'm hoping I can find a used EV pack for this purpose once I have solar panels fitted. It should be enough storage to not need to draw energy from the grid although I'll keep the connection for a back up.
We've been designing batteries to be energy efficient for a hundred years now, a major factor is that this make them easy to sell but a good move in the future would be to build all batteries in a way that would make then easy to recycle or simply just repair and restart as relatively efficient energy storage devices. But if that can't be done then lets just build them in a way that would make them easy to recycle and create new batteries. Look at the world today and think how it might be in a thousand years time - there are a lot of issues that we need to fix if we want to keep humans looking up into the heavens for other alien lives.
So it's enough to supply power to a couple of hundred homes. For how long, pray?
Your standards converter provides no answer.
Depends on how much power they can put out. If it's 25MW, they can supply a lot of houses for an hour (somewhere in the region of 7000 I think? I may have a decimal in the wrong place. It's late.), but it's unreasonable to assume they'll put out that much power for that length of time, given the huge strain it would place on the batteries.
They don't provide that information, though. They just give theoretical capacities without context.
Quicks maths:
Article says 1300 used EV batteries. Let's *ASSUME* they were ALL Tesla power packs (The article doesn't clearly say to be fair - but bear with...)
- 1300x 85kWh Tesla power packs = 110,500kWh/110.5mWh capacity
- 85kWh packs are rated for ~125KW continuous output (They can peak higher, but let's remain conservative/realistic)
- 125KW x 1300 = 162.5MW continuous output
After a quick Google, apparently it takes ~1MWh to power ~750 homes, so theoretically this arrangement could power 82,875 'average' US homes for an hour. Admittedly an awful lot of assumptions here but makes for interesting reading.
yeah maybe it wasn't stated correctly. Here is how it works.
Electrical power demand varies throughout the day and night for obvious reasons. But rather than just having one ginormous plant throttle output to the demand (expensive, inefficient) you run many power plants of varying kinds, some of which (nuclear, coal) run at 100% all of the time, and others (hydro, solar, wind, "peaker") that can be turned on and off as needed.
But to use the wind and solar plants as much as possible, the power grid often has battery storage to suck up power when demand is lower,l and deliver it when demand is higher, thereby evening out demand a bit to make it possible to (let's say) NOT start up gas-powered plants for only a few hours a day during peak demand times (rather better to leave them running at lower power and throttle up when needed and rotate demand to different plants to 'level out the wear/tear' and always have them ready for unexpected demand).
In any case batteries are an effective way to level out demand somewhat and (hopefully) keep costs down. They come with a price (lose around 10% of what they store) but is good enough.
So yeah building more battery storage out of used car batteries is a GOOD thing - as long as they do not burst into flames.
NOTE: When I was in the Navy I worked in the engine room (nuclear sub) and so I became VERY familiar with battery storage and electrical power generation. A properly designed system can easily and automatically shift loads between generators and battery storage systems,. As an example, certain loads would trip shore power breakers if started, but running was OK. So I'd typically take up load on the battery for a bit to allow the equipment to start without tripping breakers, then zero out the battery again. Battery charges were generally scheduled unless we specifically did something to drain it, and there was enough capacity to handle short term peak loads like that.
You seem to be assuming short duration top up only. Even here in the Scottish Highlands where its pretty windy we get days or weeks where all the environment enhancing beautiful windfarms are doing sod all.
The other element that is being ignored here is that all these EV car owners have to spend out on a new battery. Makes me want to re-think the economics.
"The other element that is being ignored here is that all these EV car owners have to spend out on a new battery. Makes me want to re-think the economics."
Because after a few hundred thousand miles the engine in your ICE has required no maintenance at all, and is still in pristine condition.
my understanding is that EV batteries need full replacement every 3-5 years, at a cost of around $10k. YMMV of course [bad PUNishment I know] but my car is >20 years old and the total major drive train maintenance (other than tires ad breaks) was $2000 or so when I got a new exhaust system less than 10 years ago.
If it were an EV I probably would have replaced the battery 3 or 4 times at the price of A WHOLE NEW CAR.
And resale on EVs kinda stinks, because of that foreboding battery replacement cost.
well you are right. The assumption I was making here is that the wind and solar plants were actually working as intended.
But of course when they do not (bad weather, night time) then you do not need a peaker plant (or batteries), you need a standby fossil fuel plant to take up the slack, usually an oil burner or natural gas plant.
"So it's enough to supply power to a couple of hundred homes. For how long, pray?"
3.78 minutes.
There's no way to tell as there are too many variables. Season, weather, holidays, etc. People will be less likely to conserve if they are too far removed. If they have to live with a limited local backup power supply that could run out depending on what they and nobody else is doing, they might take notice and conserve.
I'm against large scale grid backup using Li batteries. It's more important that hospitals have a local back up along with emergency services. It makes sense for EV charging stations to have battery storage on site so they can deliver maximum power to charging vehicles for short time periods without needing the local grid to be able to carry that load. Some stations already do this to reduce peak energy charges or to be able to offer high charing rates in places where it would take a large expansion of the utilities. When the station isn't charging a car(s) or the car is tapering down, the battery reserve can be topped up.
I've had an EV for nearly 5 years, not lost a single cell yet. There are companies waiting to start recycling but there is limited product available as they are so reliable. And with vehicle to grid, vehicle to load and vehicle to home technologies they are much more than just a car. There are many reasons why EVs are so much better than ICE vehicles, check out the Fully Charged You Tube channel or visit one of their shows.
I strongly suspect that the lack of battery recycling facilities, to get at the metals that matter, is not due to the difficulty in doing so, but to the number of batteries that are scrapped per month. If we can exract metals from their ores then they can be extracted from the compounds used in the batteries.
You would not build a recycling plant to handle 50 batteries per month. But if it was 500 per week, you might consider it. What if it was 5000 old batteries per week?? That's 260,000 per year. Once we are all on battery power, recycling batteries for the metals will become economically viable. So a battery would power a car, then get replaced, then act as a power storage unit for the power grid, then finally have its metals extracted, and become a new battery, and enter the cycle again.
1.61 million new cars were registered in 2022. Eventually old cars get recycled. When the old hydrocarbon powered cars die out and we areall mainly electric, that's a lot of batteries, and if an electric car uses two or three power packs in its lifetime, that's a huge number of batteries which will get repurposed then recycled into new ones. And today, lithium is currently $85,500 per ton.
It's worth looking at some numbers to see how they stack up.
Firstly, what is the expected lifetime of an EV battery in a vehicle? If there are enough old EV batteries to make this re-use viable, there have been enough end-of-vehicle-life batteries for Tesla buyers (other brands of EVs are available...) to find out how long their expensive toys will last.
Secondly, what is the expected lifetime of an ex-EV battery used as electricity grid storage?
Thirdly, what is the expected lifetime of an EV battery with regard to fire? It should be considerably longer than the first two...
I would also suggest that one method of EV battery recycling would be to get the miners to do it by crunching up the EVs and adding them to the input ores. Old EVs have far higher concentrations of interesting metals than the ores the miners use. And, by the way, lithium in particular should be easy to recycle, as most of its salts are water-soluble.
I'm not 100% sure that home insurance companies will be entirely happy when home owners install second hand EV batteries, so as to store any power collected by solar cells.
After all, if a small but faulty Li-Ion battery used in an multi-million $ passenger jet causes a fire that then writes off the plane, then I'm not sure that insurers will be happy to cover the rebuilding and contents of (potentially) hundreds of thousands of domestic properties...
In fact, I'd be scared to leave the property unoccupied, as it is possible for a Li-Ion battery to catch fire without being under load.
Better make sure not to have a gas supply in your house.
LiFePo (more common than plain LiIon) are much more thermally stable, and the charge/discharge cycles are usually not steep (remember these are packs capable of 100kW or more, and likely only being used at 3-5kW in a domestic environment).
A couple notes that aren't clear from the article:
1) we (especially at a site like el Reg) tend to think of grid connected batteries like a giant UPS and scoff at their capacity. In reality, they're not intended to carry a load on their own, instead they'll be used as dispatchable power (possibly as dispatichable *reactive* power). This can be extremely important for grid stability, and can be highly lucrative (look at spot electricity proces when the grid is stressed).
2) This is a "second life" application in the industry, it's a way to wring additional value out of the battery with full understanding that the next stop is the recyclers.
3) There are strong signs that batteries made with recycled lithium outperform those made from "new" lithium. I don't have links to any of the papers handy, but there is speculation that recycled lithium had a more porous structure and therefore a higher effective surface area.
4) Increasing internal series resistance is one factor in degraded battery performance. That will limit your charge and discharge rates due to heating. A bigger factor is Lithium plating (where lithium comes out of solution and plates the anode, resulting in less lithium able to participate in the chemical reaction that powers the cell). This is where stationary storage comes in to play (you're not carrying the batteries around with you, so more space and weight is less of a concern.
5) in the US, Li-Ion recycling is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. The EU has additonal regulations for manufacturers that compels them to have the end of life stream figured out. (Not that even in the US, there is a viable model in how lead-acid car batteries are recycled)
Anon, cause I spent all morning working with a 100+kWh Li-Ion pack that is destined for life in stationary storage someday soon.
Excuse me, you might find that the EV market is already saturated, with only the hype pushing it on in the hope that we idiots will buy more of the things.
Limitations such as climate, chargers, cost of electricity, range etc are putting the brakes on further take up of this cul-de-sac technology.
My advice, ditch your Betamax and Gramophone, Granddad, and wait for fuel cell development to mature. Then we will see an auto revolution which won't involve the horrendous accidents and melted people that are certainly coming our way with all these spent lithium batteries.
You've nearly got a full house of FUD there.
EV market is currently growing strongly, at the expense of flammable/explosive liquid based vehicles.
Limitations:
- Climate (don't buy ICE, go EV)
- Chargers (not perfect, but getting better each year. Soon you'll be bemoaning the lack of liquid fuel dispensers)
- Cost of electrons, I get about 2p/mile, using current diesel costs (£1.70/l) and my previous vehicle's economy (38mpg, call it 40) that's 20p/miles - literally ten times the price.
Of course I get more expensive electrons on a long journey - say a journey that's fully twice the range of my battery - I pay 2p/mile for the first battery then 65-75p/kWh -> 16-19p/mile for the second (and a little spare) so I pay ~9p/mile for the rare exceptionally long journey, still half the price of liquid fuels.
- Range. You need to stop every so often, but 350+ days a year I don't spend any time charging - not even a "quick" ten minutes at the smelly garage once a week.
- Horrendous accidents aren't actually made any better or worse by EVs - slightly more energy to dissipate, but not all that much.
- I've never actually seen anyone melted by a battery, plenty of images of people self immolating with your choice of "safe" propulsion.
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