Latest news with #Lankton
The Star
30-06-2025
- Automotive
- The Star
Redwood unveils plan for data centre powered by used batteries
Batteries on site at a data centre on Redwood Materials' campus in Sparks, Nevada - Bloomberg Sparks (Nevada): Battery recycling company Redwood Materials Inc has launched what it says is the largest deployment of reused batteries globally. They're powering a data centre operated by Crusoe, a member of OpenAI's Project Stargate. Demand for clean, reliable power is increasing, spurred by the rise of data centres powering artificial intelligence (AI). Grid-scale batteries are key to fulfilling this demand and supporting intermittent renewables. The 2,000-GPU data centre is located on Redwood's Sparks, Nevada, campus, where the firm runs a large battery recycling operation. The storage system uses hundreds of repurposed electric vehicle (EV) batteries, according to Cal Lankton, the company's chief commercial officer. Solar panels help provide electricity for a system with 12 megawatts of power and 63 megawatt-hours of capacity. That's enough to power about 9,000 homes. The system is the largest microgrid in North America, according to Redwood. Redwood founder and chief executive officer J B Straubel said in an interview on Bloomberg TV last Thursday that the company is 'aiming at projects that are 20 to 100 times larger than this' for its next deployments. 'There's a lot to come in the pipeline,' Straubel said. Data centres are putting a greater strain on the grid. A new BloombergNEF report published last Wednesday found that their energy demand last year was equal to 1.4% of global supply. Nearly half of all data centre capacity is in the United States. Founded in 2017 by Straubel, who also co-founded Tesla Inc, Redwood recycles, refines and produces battery materials and is one of the biggest battery recyclers in North America. The end-of-life EV packs and modules it takes in are no longer suitable for transportation due to demand for greater range and better battery health. But they're still usable for grid-scale storage, Lankton said, which will be the focus of its new division dubbed Redwood Energy. 'Think of this almost like a retirement home for these batteries,' Lankton said of the new installation. He added that Redwood's reused batteries are half the cost of new lithium-ion systems but offer the same performance. That's possible, he said, because stationary storage is less hard on the batteries than powering an EV. When paired with renewable energy sources like wind and solar, stationary energy storage systems help stabilise the grid while reducing costs by smoothing out fluctuations in power demand. Redwood generated about US$200mil in revenue last year through its recycling operations, and Lankton said the company expects a 'meaningful increase in revenue in the back half of this year as we deploy more storage projects'. He declined to name customers of upcoming projects. — Bloomberg
New York Post
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
The ‘nightmare' story behind the creepy prop awarded to the Liberty's defensive player of the game
At the start of the season, Liberty video coordinator and player development coach Brian Lankton wanted to try something new. He hoped the team would embrace it. That, or they might think it was silly. He took the chance anyway. So after the Liberty beat the Aces in their season opener, Lankton pulled out a replica of Freddy Krueger's infamous claw-like glove from the 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' movies and explained what it means to be the team's 'glove' of the game.
Business Insider
22-04-2025
- Automotive
- Business Insider
EV battery maker Northvolt failed after blowing through $15 billion. This US rival thinks it won't suffer the same fate.
When Northvolt went bankrupt, it sent shockwaves through the cleantech industry. Backed by big names such as Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, the Swedish startup had set out to revolutionize electric vehicle battery production — not just recycling them, but making new ones, too. Redwood Materials, a US rival run by Tesla cofounder JB Straubel, is trying to tackle the same problem without succumbing to overambition. To do that, it focuses on upstream materials, maintains strategic partnerships, and avoids direct competition with customers. Why Northvolt failed Northvolt's vision was as audacious as it was complex. With $15 billion in funding, the company planned to handle everything in-house: sourcing raw materials, recycling batteries into black mass (a powder rich in nickel, lithium, cobalt, and manganese), refining that material via hydrometallurgy, and then producing battery cells at a massive scale. With that scope came massive risk. Building and scaling cell manufacturing — especially outside Asia — is notoriously difficult. Northvolt struggled to ramp up operations at its Arctic Circle facility and increasingly relied on Chinese equipment, which slowed production and created bottlenecks. Costs ballooned, debts mounted, and the company ultimately couldn't keep up. "Northvolt went a little too fast," said an investor who has backed startups in this industry. "They tried to commercialize before perfecting the process at scale." This person asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters. Northvolt did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Redwood wants to be 'Switzerland' Redwood Materials, by contrast, focuses on what it sees as the most valuable — and underinvested — piece of the EV battery supply chain: cathode active materials. CAM accounts for roughly 60% of a battery's value and 15% of the cost of an electric vehicle, according to Redwood. There's no large-scale CAM production in North America, and that's the gap Redwood wants to fill. "We're not making battery cells. That's never been part of the plan," said Cal Lankton, Redwood's chief commercial officer. "We don't want to compete with our customers." Instead, Redwood recycles EV battery production scrap and old batteries into usable metals and refines them into CAM, which it sells to cell manufacturers such as Panasonic and Toyota. This strategy keeps the company neutral while generating revenue from multiple points in the supply chain. "As JB would say, we can be Switzerland," Lankton told me when I met him recently at Redwood's campus in Nevada's high desert. Unlike Northvolt, which produced its own batteries and used its recycled material internally, Redwood aims to sell its refined materials to a broad range of customers, reducing dependency on any one player and avoiding direct competition with partners that make batteries. "What Northvolt set out to build is incredibly impressive — the scope, the aspiration of what they tried to do," Lankton said. "I don't want to come across at all as denigrating what happened." However, he said that by trying to make batteries itself, Northvolt added extra layers of risk, complexity, and expense. "You're competing with your customers. So you would only produce CAM for your own consumption, which was Northvolt's plan, right?" Lankton added. "So if any piece in there falls apart, the whole thing breaks." Step-by-step Redwood has also been more measured in its scaling. While Northvolt attempted to go from lab to commercial production in one giant leap, Redwood moves step-by-step — refining materials, building CAM capacity, and only taking on new challenges when it's ready. For example, Lankton said that while Redwood initially intended to hold onto intermediate recycled materials until its CAM operations ramped up, the company made a tactical pivot: sell the intermediate products now, generate revenue, and prove its capabilities. "A dollar today for a company in our position is much more valuable than a dollar to use in the future," Lankton said. "Let's convert that inventory into cash. Let's demonstrate our capability to our investors, to our customers, to the market." Redwood also used to make copper foil, a main ingredient in batteries. When Chinese companies began churning this out in massive quantities, prices plummeted, so Redwood halted that part of its business. "We're not dogmatic," Lankton said. "We're not going to take a business plan and just do it until we think it works and run ourselves into the ground." Lessons from Northvolt Northvolt's bankruptcy isn't just a cautionary tale — it's a live case study. The company's downfall underscores the perils of over-integration, overreach, and underestimating the difficulty of battery cell manufacturing. Redwood Materials is learning and taking a different tack by positioning itself not as a battery maker, but as an enabler of the EV battery supply chain. "I think that's one of the strengths of Redwood, and I again, not to put too fine a point on it, something that Northvolt kind of struggled with, which is finding those pivot points when the original plan perhaps is getting more expensive or further out in the future," Lankton said.
