Former Tesla CTO's company gives a second life to old electric car batteries
Redwood Materials said Thursday it is recycling old electric car batteries into energy storage systems. The main feature of this approach is that used batteries are "significantly cheaper" than new ones.
Here's What We Know
Redwood Materials, an electric car battery recycling and manufacturing company, was founded in 2017 by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel. The company created a new division, Redwood Energy, to manage energy storage projects. Its stated goal is to take "worn out but functional" electric vehicle batteries out of the recycling stream and repurpose them into "low-cost, large-scale" energy storage systems that can help close critical gaps in the power grid.
Redwood says it receives more than 20 GWh of batteries annually - the equivalent of 250,000 electric vehicles - which is about 90 per cent of all lithium-ion batteries and battery materials recycled in North America. And often the batteries it receives for recycling still have a high usable energy capacity - up to 50 per cent. These are batteries that are no longer suitable for powering an electric vehicle, but still have enough potential to serve some other purpose.
So instead of recycling still-working batteries, Redwood is turning them into stationary storage systems. The company says this is a promising endeavour as more and more electric car batteries reach the end of their useful life. Redwood estimates that more than 100,000 electric vehicles will take off America's roads this year alone.
Redwood has already deployed its first 12MW, 63MWh grid - located at the company's Nevada campus and used to power the company's Crusoe modular data centre. Redwood calls it "the largest deployment of recycled batteries in the world," with enough energy to power "9,000 homes, support 20 Amtrak train rides between New York City and Washington, D.C., or charge an electric car for a 240,000-mile trip - the distance to the moon."
Redwood uses Tesla/Panasonic batteries, as well as batteries from Ford, Toyota, Nissan, Specialized, Amazon, Lyft, Rad Power Bikes, Lime and others. The company also makes anodes and cathodes, critical battery components, at a plant in South Carolina.
Source: TheVerge
