China’s Big Hydro Plans
China is in the midst of a gigantic buildup of hydro-energy capabilities. The worlds largest pumped-energy-storage stationa technique that stores energy by pumping it uphill to a reservoiris set to complete phase two of its construction in 2023. The station, called Fengning and located about 200 kilometers north of Beijing, will store up to 40 gigawatt-hours of energy, and help keep the grid on clean energy when the wind isnt blowing or the suns not shining. Separately, the Lianghekou hydropower station in Tibet is also set to come fully online in 2023, and is expected to generate a whopping 11 terawatt-hours of electricity annually . These massive construction projects are intended to help China meet its goal of going carbon neutral by 2060.
Storage: Retirement Home For Old Ev Batteries
The global shift from petroleum-fuelled to electric vehicles has flagged an urgency in finding ways to reuse or recycle retired EV batteries.
BloombergNEF data shows that globally, the number of retired EV batteries is forecast to exceed 3.4 million packs by 2025, compared to around 55,000 in 2018. In August last year, China – where around half of all the worlds EVs are now sold – implemented a new rule to make carmakers liable for expired batteries amid increasing waste in the sector. While European car manufacturers are also responsible for ensuring that the batteries they install are properly disposed of at the end of their EV performance-life.
However new research shines a light on an emerging market for batteries that no longer meet EV performance standards as remanufactured stationary storage for homes – offering a source of cheap and available battery storage. And it has car manufacturers sensing a business opportunity with some leading carmakers developing strategic alliances to create a second life market for used EV batteries.
A second life for EV batteries
Shown in figure 1, due to the rapid rise of EVs, McKinsey estimate that repurposing EV batteries has the potential to exceed 200 gigawatt-hours by 2030, representing a global value upward of $30 billion by 2030.
Figure 1: Second-life EV batteries supply
However, the report highlights a number of current challenges of reuse, such as:
Trialling second-life potential
Australia
Meeting The Global Need For Energy Storage
Battery-based energy storage is becoming more and more attractive due to increasing integration of intermittent and distributed renewable energy production, and the global market is expected to reach USD 8.54 billion by 2023.
Because ECO STOR is headquartered in Norway, home to the largest EV fleet in the world per capita, the company is in a unique position to bring low-cost energy storage to customers worldwide.
Two recent commercial projects of note are a 150kWh-capacity battery solution for Skipet in Bergen, an office building made of wood, and a 150kWh storage system for Holmlia School in Oslo. Both buildings are equipped with solar panels, and the ECO STOR solution provides energy storage and peak shaving to maximise energy efficiency.
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Electric Car Battery Life
Once an EV battery loses its capacity to power a vehicle, it can be used to power a home or building by contributing to a battery storagesystem. A battery energy storage system stores energy from batteries that can be used at a later time.
If you power your home with renewable energy such as wind or solar, you can also pair it with an EV battery. You can store it up to use throughout the night when wind and sunlight are reduced. Or even during the day alongside solar or wind energy. This method of generating energy can help you save on bills and reduce the amount of energy you use from the grid.
The battery on an electric car is a proven technology that will last for many years. In fact, EV manufacturers guarantee it. Nissan warrants that its electric car batteries will last eight years or 100,000 miles, for example and Tesla offers a similar guarantee.
This might seem remarkable when the battery in your mobile phone begins to wear out after only a couple of years, but during that time it might be fully charged and discharged hundreds of times. Each of these so-called charge cycles counts against the life of the battery: after perhaps 500 full cycles, a lithium-ion phone battery begins to lose a significant part of the capacity it had when new.
How Does Xstorage Work
- Used to provide Grid Services: xStorage Home could charge from the grid or discharge to the grid in order to generate the flexibility needed to further increase the penetration of renewable energy
- Renewables: xStorage Home can store energy from your renewables installation and allow to use that energy for your home when you need it
- XStorage Home: The battery stocks both grid and renewable energy during the day, allowing you to source it how you want and when you want. Thanks to Nissan + Eaton technology, you have the power .
- Redistribute over production of renewables: Sometimes, your renewables are producing more energy than needed to power the load. Therefore, xStorage Home injects the energy back into the grid when the demand is high.
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Bumps In The Road Ahead
There are a number of execution challenges to scaling this model, particularly technical and regulatory hurdles.
On the technical side, the process of repurposing batteries is costly and time-intensive. Batteries have to be removed from the vehicles, tested, repurposed and deployed. Much of this work is currently very manual. This value chain is ripe for innovation there are startups working on solutions to automate and streamline this process. For example, Universe Energy is using machine perception and robotics to automate the disassembly of batteries ReJoule is developing a faster testing protocol. For the secondary EV battery market to grow, these types of solutions must succeed and scale.
Reclaiming and repurposing batteries would be simpler and more scalable if automakers designed their batteries with reusability and recyclability in mind. Standardizing the front end of the supply chain and designing batteries to be easily removed and disassembled would make it easier and more economical to reuse the batteries at the end of their life. While there is some level of standardization in cell formats and some OEMs like Proterra and BMW are beginning to incorporate reuse principles into their battery design, the industry as a whole has a long way to go and is trending toward customization.
Electric Vehicle Battery Reuse
An analysis conducted in 2017 by Melin mentioned 75% of spent EV batteries will be reused in second-life by 2025, giving the possibility of EV batteries supplying more than 100 gigawatt-hours per year by 2030.EV batteries can retain up to two-thirds of their initial energy storage capacities in their second life. However, the process of reusing is more complex than just removing a battery pack from an EV and placing it in your garage for power. The batteries would need to undergo tests to ascertain their remaining capacity, and the cells could also be sorted out based on their left capacity and much more. This process is labour-intensive but can yield a variety of advantages.
Reusing EV batteries in homes and businesses indirectly impacts the level of CO2 emission With these facts, it’s no surprise why carmakers seek to revolutionize the reuse of EV batteries. Companies like General Motors and Nissan made way for turning second-life EV batteries into grid storage businesses in 2015. These manufacturers aren’t the only companies dealing with EV battery reuse, with BMW having a few projects up their sleeves as well.
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Towards A More Sustainable Future
Lithium-ion batteries are designed today for performance and not for recycling or second life, added You. Lithium-ion batteries usually last 12 years or less before losing the capacity to power a vehicle. Theres very little discussion right now about the environmental dimensions of improving battery design for recycling or reuse.
The demand for recycling facilities that can break down lithium-ion EV batteries and extract the raw materials inside currently outpaces supply. Due to the volume of used batteries that will need to be recycled in the coming years, that demand will only grow.
This move to optimise the design and capabilities of electric vehicle batteries and use them for renewable energy storage presents a novel opportunity to advance towards a more sustainable future.
The Value Of Used Energy Storage
The economics of second-life battery storage also depend on the cost of the repurposed system competing with new battery storage. To be used as stationary storage, used batteries must undergo several processes that are currently costly and time-intensive. Each pack must be tested to determine the remaining state of health of battery, as it will vary for each retired system depending on factors that range from climate to individual driving behavior. The batteries must then be fully discharged, reconfigured to meet the energy demands of their new application in many cases, packs are disassembled before modules are tested, equipped with a new battery management system , and re-packaged.
Depending on the ownership model and the upfront cost of a second-life battery, estimates of the total cost of a second-life battery range from $40-160/kWh. This compares with new EV battery pack costs of $157/kWh at the end of 2019. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has also created a publicly available battery second-use repurposing calculator that accounts for factors such as labor costs, warranty, and initial battery size and cost. The figure below illustrates the potential cost structure of a repurposed battery in a second-life application where the buying price is the maximum value paid for the used battery. If this value could be passed through to the original owner, it could help to defray the cost of an electric vehicle.
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Circular Economy For Ev Batteries
ECO STORs system significantly cuts the cost of small-scale energy storage. The solution also reduces the life-cycle carbon emissions of EV batteries and creates a circular economy for them.
EV batteries start out with high CO emissions because of the way they are produced, especially in Asia, explains Burchardt. But our energy storage solution turns this situation from negative to positive. It reduces the need for new battery production, optimises the use of renewable energy and facilitates recycling of spent batteries.
This is circular economy thinking at its best, he adds.
Recycling Electric Vehicle Batteries
The researchers discovered that the carbon footprint of a lithium-ion EV battery can be decreased by up to 17% if it is reused before being recycled. Batteries with reduced energy storage capacity can be repurposed to store wind and solar energy.
This exciting new research is crucial to manufacturing lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles that are created for sustainability as well as performance.
What to do with all these retired electric vehicle batteries is going to be a huge issue, explained Fengqi You, one of the authors of the study.
The research team considered environmental and economic tradeoffs in how batteries are built, used, and recycled.
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How Long Do Electric Car Batteries Last
The hundreds of gently topped-up cells inside an EV battery mean that each battery pack is expected to retain its charging-discharging capacity from 100,000 to 200,000 miles. Manufacturers are so confident of the batterys road use that most electric cars come with an extended warranty of eight years, or 100,000 miles.
The battery will outlive the car…
The battery will outlive the car, says Graeme Cooper confidently. Today, most EV batteries have a life expectancy of 15 to 20 years within the car and a second life beyond.
Its also worth noting that EV battery technology is still evolving, so as tech develops we expect batteries lifespan to increase as well as becoming cheaper, smaller and even lighter.
How Safe Are Electric Car Batteries
The manufacturers of batteries for electric cars go to great lengths to make sure EV batteries are safe, fitting smart management systems to prevent overheating and other problems. Batteries do get warm as they charge and discharge, but cars are designed to keep them cool high performance EVs sometimes have liquid cooling systems to help.
Despite this, there have been some cases of electric cars catching fire, but very few of these incidents have been caused by battery failures. More typically they’ve resulted from accidents or incidents that might have caused any vehicle to catch fire – such as the 2013 case of a Tesla Model S which hit a large piece of metal at high speed. Commenting on that incident, which resulted in a limited fire, Tesla CEO Elon Musk pointed out that EV batteries contain only about a tenth of the energy of a tank full of fuel, limiting the danger they pose in an accident.
In fact, a 2017 study by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that the likelihood and severity of fires from lithium-ion batteries was comparable to, or slightly less than that from conventional vehicles. As more electric vehicles take to the roads, we can be increasingly sure they’re as safe as the conventional cars they replace.
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Electric Car Battery Manufacturers
There are a large number of electric car battery manufacturers. Some are well known such as Tesla and Nissan, while others such as BYD or LG Chem, may not be as well-known around the world, but are nevertheless, significant players in the electric car battery manufacturing space. LG Chem, for instance, supply electric vehicle batteries for the likes of Volvo, Renault, Ford and Chevrolet. Not only that, but they have also signed an agreement with Telsa to supply all Telsa produced in China with batteries.
Another major electric vehicle manufacturer BYD is China’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer more than doubled its sales in December 2020 compared to the same time in 2019 and have been selling more battery-powered vehicles since the beginning of 2019. Not only are these battery manufacturers focusing on electric vehicles, but they are also working on battery storage of electricity for residential, commercial and industrial applications.
The Opportunity For Second
A typical EV battery is estimated to retain 80% of its original capacity at the end of its useful life. While this level of degradation may be unsuitable for powering a vehicle, it still has plenty of useful life for less intense use cases like stationary storage. Lithium batteries in EVs experience 5-8X more stress than a typical battery in a home or building.
As the EV market takes off, the supply of used EV batteries is set to increase dramatically. McKinsey estimates the second-life battery supply for stationary storage applications could exceed 200 GWh per year by 2030. While current constraints on the supply of used EV batteries pose a major challenge for the development of the second-life market as larger volumes of EVs are only now beginning to be sold addressing barriers to this business model now can enable its success in the future.
Startups like Moment Energy and RePurpose Energy are exploring this model. They partner with original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs, like Nissan to acquire used EV batteries, test each module to ensure its quality, and then repurpose them to provide energy storage systems to utility, commercial & industrial and microgrid customers.
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Why Ev Batteries Could Be Reused
After 8 to 12 years in a vehicle, the lithium batteries used in EVs are likely to retain more than two thirds of their usable energy storage. Depending on their condition, used EV batteries could deliver an additional 5-8 years of service in a secondary application.
The ability of a battery to retain and rapidly discharge electricity degrades with use and the passing of time. How many times a battery can deliver its stored energy at a specific rate is a function of degradation. Repeated utilization of the maximum storage potential of the battery, rapid charge and discharge cycles, and exposure to high temperatures are all likely to reduce battery performance. I break down battery degradation more in a previous blog post.
Given the light-duty cycles experienced by EV batteries, some battery modules with minimal degradation and absent defects or damage could likely be refurbished and reused directly as a replacement for the same model vehicle. Major automakers, including Nissan and Tesla, have offered rebuilt or refurbished battery packs for purchase or warranty replacement of original battery packs in EVs.
Researchers At Cornell University Have Developed A Method Of Reusing Old Electric Vehicle Batteries For Renewable Energy Storage
Cornell University researchers, partially funded by the US National Science Foundation, have published a study outlining a novel technique that repurposes old lithium-ion electric vehicle batteries and uses them for renewable energy storage.
In the study published in Science Advances, the team examined how battery chemistry, reuse, and recycling influence lithium-ion EV batteries energy output and environmental impact.
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Electric Car Battery Technology
EV batteries undergo cycles of ‘discharge’ that occur when driving and ‘charge’ when the car’s plugged in. Repeating this process over time affects the amount of charge the battery can hold. This decreases the range and time needed between each journey to charge. Most manufacturers have a five to eight-year warranty on their battery. However, the current prediction is that an electric car battery will last from 10 20 years before they need to be replaced.
How a battery and the car’s electric motor work together is surprisingly simple the battery connects to one or more electric motors, which drive the wheels. When you press the accelerator the car instantly feeds power to the motor, which gradually consumes the energy stored in the batteries.
Electric motors also work as generators, so when you take your foot off the throttle the car begins to slow down by converting its forward motion back into electricity this happens more strongly if you hit the brakes. This regenerative braking recovers energy that would otherwise be lost, storing it in the battery again and so improving the car’s range.
