Latest news with #Straubel
Yahoo
09-07-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Second-life EV batteries might play standout role in satisfying booming energy demand
SPARKS, Nev. — A little more than two years ago, JB Straubel began exploring the potential of second-life electric vehicle batteries in energy storage applications. His first test: powering a microgrid that runs the electricity at his home. 'It's a whole family experiment,' he said. Now Straubel, CEO of battery recycling and reuse company Redwood Materials, has embarked on a more ambitious path. His company has fashioned a microgrid in the Nevada desert out of 792 repurposed EV battery packs from manufacturers including Toyota, General Motors and Volkswagen, among others. Redwood bills this as the largest second-life battery deployment in North America. It holds 12 megawatts and 63 megawatt-hours of energy capacity, which feeds an artificial intelligence data center built on site. An adjacent solar array provides energy. Straubel said bigger projects are on the horizon. Sign up for the weekly Automotive News Mobility Report newsletter for the latest developments at the intersection of transportation and technology. The size of Redwood's microgrid and the scope of the company's forthcoming plans have prompted a fresh look at the potential of repurposed EV batteries to serve as capable storage devices while an energy boom sparked by AI is underway. AI data centers are demanding more electricity. They already claimed 4.4 percent of U.S. electricity in 2024, according to the Department of Energy, and that could jump as high as 12 percent by 2028. That means in just three years, data centers could devour as much as 580 terawatt-hours of electricity. Energy system providers have installed a record number of energy storage systems in North America in the first half of 2025, according to Boston Consulting Group. The firm estimates that demand will grow from 52 gigawatt hours of capacity this year to 90 GWh at the end of the decade. Second-life EV batteries are a piece of that puzzle. 'Retired EV batteries will make a dent in upcoming storage needs,' said Jessica Dunn, a scientist in the clean transportation program with the Union of Concerned Scientists. But if a critical mass with enough remaining capacity exists, some wonder if harvesting batteries of multiple chemistries and slotting them into storage systems translates into a healthy business. They must be priced far more favorably than brand-new systems, which offer the advantage of higher reliability and less-frequent maintenance. Historically, second life has been a dicey value proposition, said Nathan Niese, global lead for EVs and energy storage at Boston Consulting Group. 'The premise makes a ton of sense,' he said. 'What has been tricky up to this point has been getting the economics right.' Redwood believes an inflection point has arrived. It has started a business division called Redwood Energy that's dedicated to repurposing batteries in storage applications. Its business case is buoyed by its position as a leading battery recycler, Straubel said. The company said it receives about 90 percent of all lithium ion batteries and battery materials recycled in North America. Sheer scale is a 'compelling' part of the business case, Straubel said, that allows Redwood to provide second-life storage at low dollar-per-kilowatt-hour costs. The company expects to have more than 5 gWh of capacity over the next 12 months. Even without such scale, others in the burgeoning second-life battery industry see favorable business conditions forming, especially as industry leaders and government officials seek domestic supply chains for battery materials. 'To really retain those strategic materials in the United States, you have to commit to reuse before recycling,' said Antoni Tong, CEO of Smartville, a San Diego battery startup that builds energy storage systems with repurposed EV batteries sourced from automakers, suppliers and fleets. 'Otherwise, the country with the lower labor costs will gobble up the materials.' Tariffs could give America's fledgling battery repurposing industry a tailwind, Straubel said. In particular, decreased imports of lithium iron phosphate batteries from China mean growing interest in feedstock already here. 'It makes this look extremely more competitive,' he said. But provisions in the 'Big Beautiful Bill' signed by President Donald Trump this month could introduce a countervailing effect by phasing out tax credits for wind and solar energy by the end of 2027. Battery storage is often paired with wind and solar energy sources to minimize intermittency. Further, the removal of EV tax credits could hurt the supply of used batteries down the road. 'We'll have a slower uptake of EVs without the tax credit,' Dunn said. 'We'll probably adjust our forecast. But it's not going to stop the industry. … This transition to lower-carbon technologies is happening.' Redwood may be the biggest mover in the battery repurposing space, but it is not the first. 'We've seen this coming for a long time,' Tong said. 'To really get the full value of circularity, you need to get the highest use of batteries before grinding them down for their material value.' Last December, Smartville outfitted Nissan's North American headquarters in Franklin, Tenn., with a 500-KWh energy-storage system comprising used batteries from the Nissan Leaf EV. Nissan also supplies B2U Storage Solutions, another California second-life startup, with used batteries. Among other projects, the company has operated a 3-MW, 28-MWh hybrid storage system that uses 1,300 repurposed EV batteries in Lancaster, Calif., since 2020. The system is a hybrid; it is powered by energy from the grid and a solar installation. Element Energy opened a 53-MWh storage facility in Texas in February 2024 comprising 900 used EV batteries. It provides power to the state's grid under the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, representing about 90 percent of the electric load in Texas. Straubel eschews grid connections, at least for now, in favor of speed. Redwood needed no permits for its installation. Grid connections, backup generators and pouring concrete may have all required permits. Without the need for them, Redwood and Crusoe, its AI data center partner, completed the microgrid in less than five months, Straubel said. 'We built this whole thing without even needing to really go through an approval process,' he said. 'You can deploy this very fast.' 'It's a bit fortuitous that we find ourselves built in the middle of this particular datacenter Mecca.' The likes of Apple, Google and Microsoft are all building data centers down the road from Redwood in this otherwise-barren desert environment. They would make logical targets for the company's next installation, though Straubel did not detail next steps. 'It's a bit fortuitous that we find ourselves built in the middle of this particular data-center mecca,' he said. Whether here or in other hotspots like Texas, he is confident the company's new microgrid is a first step of many more ahead in giving EV batteries a new lease on life in energy storage. 'We'll absolutely see much larger deployments of this,' Straubel said. 'We are actively engineering and working on those projects today.' Have an opinion about this story? Tell us about it and we may publish it in print. Click here to submit a letter to the editor.
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
