This is less useful than most people expected. Redwood has been struggling because the expected battery turnover is not occurring. EV batteries are lasting a long time, so they stay in the car are and not being recycled or reused in any quantity yet.
If EV batteries last 20+ years in EV's, it'll be > 2040 before there are significant numbers of EV batteries available to recycle or reuse.
I find this somewhat amusing, because the black PR of the fossil-fuel industry would have us believe that EV batteries basically have a 2-year lifespan, cost lots of CO2 to produce, instantly become toxic waste after those 2 years, are non-recyclable, and overall as a result EVs emit more CO2 than gasoline-burning cars. We are being told that EVs have a larger CO2 footprint than gasoline-burners.
Then Redwood shows up with a perfect way to utilize all those discarded batteries without even opening them up, and… that toxic industrial junk isn't even there?
That's part of it. Yet there is a growing gwh of EV batteries that gets retired on a yearly basis. Which is what Redwood has been tapping into. There is also a certain amount of cells that don't make it past the quality gates in the factory that get recycled via them.
Also people forget how quickly EVs have grown. The Tesla Model 3 came out in 2017; that's eight years ago. That was pretty much the first mass market EV that got produced by the hundreds of thousands per year. It had eight years of battery warranty. Most EVs you see on the road were produced after 2017 and typically come with similar warranty. The simple reality is that the vast majority of EV batteries ever produced is still under it's factory warranty and nowhere near its warranty life time. The amount of gwh of battery that becomes available for companies like Redwood is fairly predictable as it is tied to the production volume 8-15 years ago.
Redwood is basically tapping into the growing number of cars that get scrapped early because of accidents or other failures. That's a smallish percentage of overall vehicles produced but at the rate EVs started getting produced around eight years ago, it's starting to add up to a few gwh of battery per year. It's not a lot yet but it's not that unpredictable. And it's not nothing. If you manufacturer new batteries at 80$/kwh, producing 1 gwh new would cost about 80M$. So giving batteries a second life has quite a bit of economic value. The issue for Redwood is probably more that competition for these batteries is quite fierce. There is a lot of valuable stuff you can do with these things and lots of companies eagerly looking to pick up second hand EVs for their batteries.
Top it how cheap batteries have gotten it makes little sense to remanufacture unless you are extremely dedicated DIYer, live somewhere with very cheap labour or it's done in massive scale to achieve economies of scale.
In NZ you can get 60KWh used Tesla battery for 6-10k NZD, then spend another 1-2k for additional gear + labour to hack it (overall $116-200/KWh) or 15KWh for 3.5k ($233/KWh) with warranty and safety guarantees.
Without being a battery chemistry expert, why do these battery packs become not useful for an EV yet could still be useful for energy storage. They keep saying that 80% of life becomes unusable for EV, but that's still a lot of life. Is it that grid energy is more of a constant drain while the EV is lots of hard pulls (for lack of better wording)? In an EV, the battery cannot provide the higher volts being requested within rating, but a grid is never demanding peak performance?
The load in an EV is very different than in storage. Basically the charge and discharge rate is what deteriorates the battery. EVs need a lot of power delivered quickly in bursts when you accelerate (tens/hundreds of kw). And then fast charging when the driver is in a hurry also puts a lot of stress on the battery. With storage solutions, the power requirements are much less intense. These high bursts of energy would actually blow the fuse in your house. They are simply not needed. And there is no need for fast charging them either. Instead they get charged over many hours when there is cheap power available.
Companies like Redwood are good at assessing the state of the battery and then managing it such that it is run optimally. Usually, it's just a few cells that are no longer working; the rest of the pack is still be fine. So that just means the max output of the pack drops a bit. But that's still more than fine for storage if all you need is a few kw of output.
Running the battery optimally also extends the useful life of the remaining cells.
> Can "second life" EV batteries work as grid-scale energy storage?
Yes
is it profitable? probably not.
Looking at the price for brid battery storage, and its dropping precipitously. The cost isn't as much in the batteries them selves, it packaging, placing and then controlling them.
For example if you want to have a 200Mwhr 100Mw storage site, you'll need to place it, join it to the grid, all doable. Then you need the switch gear to make it work as you want it to.
For day ahead, 30 minute trading, thats fairly simple.
For grid stabilisation, thats a bit harder, you need to be able to lead/match/lag the grid frequency by n degrees instantaneously. which is trivial at a few kw, much harder at 100Mw
Germany alone had to pay 2 billion in dispatch measures to energy providers. And in the last 6 month we had news about a HUGE request of companies wanting to build grid stabilisation and grid market battery systems in a range of over 100GwH.
Also we do have industries which would be able to save a ton of money if the invest in smaller but similiar systems today already due to energy prices.
And in germany for example, we do have a lot of wind energy in the north but not enough live transit capacity to get it into the south. In this scenario the market would again stabilize the grid by charging at night from cheap / free wind energy production in north and transfering it to the south and then using it at day.
Betteridge's law of headlines finally fails? TL;DR: Yes, but you can also make it 'not work' if you choose to politicize the tech solution to the energy problem.
Seems like the market is going the hybrid route. It's kind of easy to see why, best of both worlds. Some BYD hybrids have crazy ranges like 1500 km on a tank of gas. The more practical car is winning. They put in a much small battery in these for fast charge, and the daily commute range. And you have gas, for longer trips. Maybe smaller batteries would be better for grid-scale storage too. If they're lighter and easier to handle.
No, hybrid is just a temporary solution until the charging infrastructure becomes good enough. And depending where you live, it's already there.
Hybrid is the worse of both worlds in a way. You have a combustion engine to maintain, that is useless when using electricity. You have a heavy battery useless when using your combustion engine.
You don't get all the benefits of electric, and you don't get all the benefits of ICE.
Personally speaking, having just bought an Ioniq 5 and installing solar at home what I see as the near future improvement is adding V2L functionality, which I can hook up to the generator input of my solar inverter, essentially adding another 60kWh buffer to my grid storage.
Considering how expensive residential batteries are and how quickly EVs depreciate, I think soon it'll be cheaper to get a used EV as a cheap source of cells that accidentally happens to be able to drive itself around.
Imo V2G, and V2H is unnecessary and add too much complication, I think for the future, solar inverters already have the necessary hardware and certifications to be able to take power and safely connect to the grid - something that requires different hardware and standards compliance in basically every country (yes even within the EU).
EVs are probably not going to depreciate as much in the future. The depreciation mostly happened because new electric cars have become cheaper.
As an example, let's say a 2 year old car is only worth 80% of an identical brand new car. The old car was bought for $50k at new, leading to a expected depreciated value of $40k. But since manufacturing has become more efficient a brand new car of the same model can be had for the same $40k. Nobody would be willing to buy the 2 year old car at the same price. You'd probably have to charge only $32k [0]. But then it looks to you as if it has depreciated 36%.
The question is how much new electric cars will fall in price in the future. And if they continue to fall, at some point the dollar value of the depreciation will be too small to care about.[1]
0: $32k = 0.8 * $40k
1: E.g. if a new car is $10k, $3600 in depreciation over two years is annoying, but not a big deal.
We don't need ev batteries for this. We just need cheap enough LifePo4 so we're not burning more shit down. Prismatics from China are a start, Salt batteries showing some promise next.
You are just not able to comprehend basic writing styles.
The author is a journalist and not the expert he is interviewing thats the first thing. So why would you even evaluate the journalists 'expertise' if you get the answers from the experts.
And secondly what he probalby meant was that what if this company can 'push out' all active lifecycle before they recycle them.
We don't have a lot of car makers and we do not have a huge amount of EV models.
Either you are doing this on small scale, than you can select one or two specific EV models and use these batterie packs or you do it in big scale, than you can also easily adapt the most x batterie packs and only use these across your system.
If you go down to the cell level, its more effort true but then you probably only handel cell types of a handfull of manufacturer again.
> the real challenge is standardization and integration. Different manufacturers use vastly different battery management systems (BMS) and cell configurations - a Tesla pack is fundamentally different from a Nissan Leaf pack.
Isn't that exactly what the article is about? Have you actually read the article?
>So top of the list for us, of course, designing this thing is safety.
Funny issue I learned after talking to a founder at a similar company: although the battery packs were certified safe for cars (passing crash tests, wild heat differences from AK to AZ, people sitting on top of the battery packs in the car)
... the founder had issues re-certifying the batteries for safe use in a static location for grid storage.
The certification process treated his company like the batteries were made from scratch even though they used the same BMS/coolant lines/etc. already proven and tested.
It's clear you still need strong safety regulations and practices in the rare case there's an event, but the founder noted the grid storage industry regulations were adding redundant safety testing and slowing down adoption. The founder also added it's difficult to compete on cost even with effectively free used EV batteries in this startup space of grid storage against the low cost of Chinese made grid-specific batteries due to the added testing + custom hardware + space constraints and other items. (Caveat: I didn't fact check any of their statements)
In an ice storm and cold cloudy snap that sweeps the country, NO lithium batteries will save the grid. I'm weary of this tunnel vision of the absurd. The only 'storage' that works is to pump water uphill with 'surplus' energy, and there is not and never will be a surplus. And these evaporartion tanks are on a scale that ecologists have to remember countless horror stories (eg., Glenn Canyon Dam). And of course there's always "mfft!" (another scheme with no numbers behind it so it's credible because I'm talking about it).
The last time there was anything rational on the table was Perry under the Trump administration's 30-day rule proposal ( https://www.nucnet.org/news/nuclear-is-vital-to-us-national-... ). It gave a hard industry incentive to any energy supplier who can have 30 days' fuel on site. This means nuclear and coal. This was no gimmick, it was the first time anyone faced reality about National Security as related to Energy for the grid and survival. And now AI datacenter yadda yadda, we're also talking about the luxury of keeping schools heated in Winter. Adverse weather even for a week is grid down game over for wind and solar. Proven natural gas are ~300 years, joy! As soon as they get around to sending pregnant whales across the ocean (losing ~20% of the gas-energy in cooling) it may even last 50 years! Before we have to go to endless war again.
I think car cells will be much more useful if they are packaged as replacement batteries for all the various battery powered tools, ebikes, etc.
There's a consumer profit margin to absorb the repackaging and teardown.
Maybe for home grid batteries they'll work too. Again, a consumer margin.
Sodium Ion and other grid-specific storage will simply be too cheap for secondhand EV batteries to compete. And the retiring cells won't be any better in density and will be less safe than the higher density sodium ion and LFP that is hitting the market.
Not second life, but first life. All EVs and charging stations should be reversible. In a world where fossil fuels cost their true value (~10x as much) and people still drive this would be a necessity for electricity generation
only if industry and government grow some gonads and fully standardise the cells, and hardware
for battery packs to allow for quick and easy dissasembly, testing, repair, and reuse, for off grid, and secondary mobile use, as industry will never trust used components for primary aplications,
it is impossible to overstate how allergic industry is to this.....
second
sodium is comming NOW!, and it is cheaper and safer.
I've spoken to people about starting a Tesla EV battery replacement business here. Battery replacement on a Tesla is a pretty simple process that can be done by one person in about 4 hours.
The problem is that it's still really hard to get your hands on salvage Tesla batteries. Enthusiasts and hackers snatch them up quickly and the used price is not very competitive with a new EV replacement from Tesla.
35 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 48.6 ms ] threadIf EV batteries last 20+ years in EV's, it'll be > 2040 before there are significant numbers of EV batteries available to recycle or reuse.
https://www.geotab.com/blog/ev-battery-health/
I find this somewhat amusing, because the black PR of the fossil-fuel industry would have us believe that EV batteries basically have a 2-year lifespan, cost lots of CO2 to produce, instantly become toxic waste after those 2 years, are non-recyclable, and overall as a result EVs emit more CO2 than gasoline-burning cars. We are being told that EVs have a larger CO2 footprint than gasoline-burners.
Then Redwood shows up with a perfect way to utilize all those discarded batteries without even opening them up, and… that toxic industrial junk isn't even there?
Also people forget how quickly EVs have grown. The Tesla Model 3 came out in 2017; that's eight years ago. That was pretty much the first mass market EV that got produced by the hundreds of thousands per year. It had eight years of battery warranty. Most EVs you see on the road were produced after 2017 and typically come with similar warranty. The simple reality is that the vast majority of EV batteries ever produced is still under it's factory warranty and nowhere near its warranty life time. The amount of gwh of battery that becomes available for companies like Redwood is fairly predictable as it is tied to the production volume 8-15 years ago.
Redwood is basically tapping into the growing number of cars that get scrapped early because of accidents or other failures. That's a smallish percentage of overall vehicles produced but at the rate EVs started getting produced around eight years ago, it's starting to add up to a few gwh of battery per year. It's not a lot yet but it's not that unpredictable. And it's not nothing. If you manufacturer new batteries at 80$/kwh, producing 1 gwh new would cost about 80M$. So giving batteries a second life has quite a bit of economic value. The issue for Redwood is probably more that competition for these batteries is quite fierce. There is a lot of valuable stuff you can do with these things and lots of companies eagerly looking to pick up second hand EVs for their batteries.
In NZ you can get 60KWh used Tesla battery for 6-10k NZD, then spend another 1-2k for additional gear + labour to hack it (overall $116-200/KWh) or 15KWh for 3.5k ($233/KWh) with warranty and safety guarantees.
Companies like Redwood are good at assessing the state of the battery and then managing it such that it is run optimally. Usually, it's just a few cells that are no longer working; the rest of the pack is still be fine. So that just means the max output of the pack drops a bit. But that's still more than fine for storage if all you need is a few kw of output.
Running the battery optimally also extends the useful life of the remaining cells.
Yes
is it profitable? probably not.
Looking at the price for brid battery storage, and its dropping precipitously. The cost isn't as much in the batteries them selves, it packaging, placing and then controlling them.
For example if you want to have a 200Mwhr 100Mw storage site, you'll need to place it, join it to the grid, all doable. Then you need the switch gear to make it work as you want it to.
For day ahead, 30 minute trading, thats fairly simple.
For grid stabilisation, thats a bit harder, you need to be able to lead/match/lag the grid frequency by n degrees instantaneously. which is trivial at a few kw, much harder at 100Mw
Based on what numbers?
Germany alone had to pay 2 billion in dispatch measures to energy providers. And in the last 6 month we had news about a HUGE request of companies wanting to build grid stabilisation and grid market battery systems in a range of over 100GwH.
Also we do have industries which would be able to save a ton of money if the invest in smaller but similiar systems today already due to energy prices.
And in germany for example, we do have a lot of wind energy in the north but not enough live transit capacity to get it into the south. In this scenario the market would again stabilize the grid by charging at night from cheap / free wind energy production in north and transfering it to the south and then using it at day.
Hybrid is the worse of both worlds in a way. You have a combustion engine to maintain, that is useless when using electricity. You have a heavy battery useless when using your combustion engine.
You don't get all the benefits of electric, and you don't get all the benefits of ICE.
Considering how expensive residential batteries are and how quickly EVs depreciate, I think soon it'll be cheaper to get a used EV as a cheap source of cells that accidentally happens to be able to drive itself around.
Imo V2G, and V2H is unnecessary and add too much complication, I think for the future, solar inverters already have the necessary hardware and certifications to be able to take power and safely connect to the grid - something that requires different hardware and standards compliance in basically every country (yes even within the EU).
As an example, let's say a 2 year old car is only worth 80% of an identical brand new car. The old car was bought for $50k at new, leading to a expected depreciated value of $40k. But since manufacturing has become more efficient a brand new car of the same model can be had for the same $40k. Nobody would be willing to buy the 2 year old car at the same price. You'd probably have to charge only $32k [0]. But then it looks to you as if it has depreciated 36%.
The question is how much new electric cars will fall in price in the future. And if they continue to fall, at some point the dollar value of the depreciation will be too small to care about.[1]
0: $32k = 0.8 * $40k
1: E.g. if a new car is $10k, $3600 in depreciation over two years is annoying, but not a big deal.
https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/recycle-with-us/
Again batteries are an energy store and not an energy source. The fact the author cannot distinguish that makes the their opinion less credible.
The author is a journalist and not the expert he is interviewing thats the first thing. So why would you even evaluate the journalists 'expertise' if you get the answers from the experts.
And secondly what he probalby meant was that what if this company can 'push out' all active lifecycle before they recycle them.
This is called a metapher.
We don't have a lot of car makers and we do not have a huge amount of EV models.
Either you are doing this on small scale, than you can select one or two specific EV models and use these batterie packs or you do it in big scale, than you can also easily adapt the most x batterie packs and only use these across your system.
If you go down to the cell level, its more effort true but then you probably only handel cell types of a handfull of manufacturer again.
Isn't that exactly what the article is about? Have you actually read the article?
Funny issue I learned after talking to a founder at a similar company: although the battery packs were certified safe for cars (passing crash tests, wild heat differences from AK to AZ, people sitting on top of the battery packs in the car) ... the founder had issues re-certifying the batteries for safe use in a static location for grid storage.
The certification process treated his company like the batteries were made from scratch even though they used the same BMS/coolant lines/etc. already proven and tested.
It's clear you still need strong safety regulations and practices in the rare case there's an event, but the founder noted the grid storage industry regulations were adding redundant safety testing and slowing down adoption. The founder also added it's difficult to compete on cost even with effectively free used EV batteries in this startup space of grid storage against the low cost of Chinese made grid-specific batteries due to the added testing + custom hardware + space constraints and other items. (Caveat: I didn't fact check any of their statements)
The last time there was anything rational on the table was Perry under the Trump administration's 30-day rule proposal ( https://www.nucnet.org/news/nuclear-is-vital-to-us-national-... ). It gave a hard industry incentive to any energy supplier who can have 30 days' fuel on site. This means nuclear and coal. This was no gimmick, it was the first time anyone faced reality about National Security as related to Energy for the grid and survival. And now AI datacenter yadda yadda, we're also talking about the luxury of keeping schools heated in Winter. Adverse weather even for a week is grid down game over for wind and solar. Proven natural gas are ~300 years, joy! As soon as they get around to sending pregnant whales across the ocean (losing ~20% of the gas-energy in cooling) it may even last 50 years! Before we have to go to endless war again.
There's a consumer profit margin to absorb the repackaging and teardown.
Maybe for home grid batteries they'll work too. Again, a consumer margin.
Sodium Ion and other grid-specific storage will simply be too cheap for secondhand EV batteries to compete. And the retiring cells won't be any better in density and will be less safe than the higher density sodium ion and LFP that is hitting the market.
Yes.
Thank you
They raised another $2.5M round too.
Fellten and Allye are the biggest two here in the UK I think.
only if industry and government grow some gonads and fully standardise the cells, and hardware for battery packs to allow for quick and easy dissasembly, testing, repair, and reuse, for off grid, and secondary mobile use, as industry will never trust used components for primary aplications, it is impossible to overstate how allergic industry is to this.....
second sodium is comming NOW!, and it is cheaper and safer.
The problem is that it's still really hard to get your hands on salvage Tesla batteries. Enthusiasts and hackers snatch them up quickly and the used price is not very competitive with a new EV replacement from Tesla.