East of San Antonio in Bexar County, 500 electric vehicle batteries at the end of their automotive lives will soon be repurposed to provide energy storage for Texas’ electric grid, a California company, B2U Storage Solutions, announced on Tuesday.
The batteries, housed in 21 cabinets the size of shipping containers, create a second life for the technology made from critical minerals, including lithium, nickel and cobalt, for another eight years, said Freeman Hall, co-founder and CEO.
Once the site is built and in operation later this year, the batteries will charge when there is an excess of renewable energy production on the grid and the cost of power is cheap. The Texas facility will have a total capacity of 24 megawatt hours.
B2U Storage Solutions, based in Los Angeles, plans to deploy three more grid-storage projects in Texas throughout the next year, totalling 100 megawatt hours across the state, the company said. Assuming the average household uses 30 kilowatt hours per day, it’s enough energy to power 3,330 homes for a day, Hall said.
The site near San Antonio will interconnect to the CPS Energy distribution system, one of the nation’s largest city-owned utility companies.
“We’re really helping to pioneer and demonstrate to the automotive industry that repurposing makes a lot of sense for a pretty healthy number of batteries before they’re truly ready for end of life and recycling,” Hall said in an interview.
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In looking for battery storage options for their solar projects, the two developers realized the first wave of commercial EV batteries were beginning to wrap up their roughly 10-year automotive life. Aware of research that these batteries’ state-of-health, measuring the difference between a new battery and a used one, circled up to 80 percent, Hall and Stern hypothesized that they could build technology to use the battery packs as they came from the vehicle, avoiding any repurposing costs.
So the two solar developers purchased 300 Nissan Leaf batteries. The carmaker had run into a powertrain warranty issue with the world’s first mass-market EV, as the range they promised in the lease with the customer fell short.
To fix the warranty and guarantee, Nissan swapped out the battery packs and found themselves with thousands of batteries that were still useful, Hall said, just not for driving. The batteries still had thousands of cycles left in a less-demanding scenario, like stationary storage for renewable energy.
That’s when the solar developers initiated the EV pack storage technology fundamental to B2U, which currently operates three facilities using retired batteries from electric vehicles like Teslas, the Honda Clarity and Nissan Leaf in California.
B2U’s technology allows the company to buy the retired EV battery packs without having to modify them, creating large-scale storage projects for less than if they were installing new batteries.
No real insight here, I just think this is a great idea. I hope they and others are able to do a lot more of this going forward.