That’s actually an ingenious idea I hadn’t thought about. How much cheaper are these batteries once they’ve been retired? Would this be a viable option for someone running solar at home, and wanting to store the power for later use, or is a home battery still the better option?
Yea, with a car you can't really use them once the range gets low enough
With this, a bunch of batteries can work together for much longer. You also don't need to worry about weight since they're in one place
A Tesla Model 3, for example, has a battery capacity of 50 to 82 kWh. Let's assume the lowest capacity of 50 kWh. A car battery is basically unusable long before it has lost around half its capacity. So 25 kWh. American households on average consume 10.6 MWh annually or about 29 kWh per day.
So an old Tesla battery still provides enough electricity to power an American household for nearly an entire day.
Really puts into perspective what a monumental waste of energy individual traffic, also with electric cars, is as well.
Well, sort of, it's just that any sort of locomotion requires a lot more energy than you might think.
Yeah sure. But there's a difference between moving a 2 ton vehicle per person or a bike.
There’s also something about their peak current being reduced with age, and in this use case, they don’t really need that peak current, so they really can stay useful for a long time in this use case
I thought I read that this was a plan Tesla had to repurpose the car batteries into power walls for home consumers. Not sure that ever ended up happening but great to see the retired car batteries given a second life
It’s the same cells inside both batteries. The difference is that the used EV car battery will store less power per volume since it’s worn out. It is a wonderful idea. A solar farm doesn’t care as much about volume and weight as a car does. For a home it would be fine as long as you’re trying to squeeze every inch cube of your property.
A 50 KWh or more battery pack will be overkill for most homes. But those will likely be available for cheap soon so it might still be a good option. Putting a pack that weighs several hundred kilos in your basement might be difficult, though.
I don’t know that a basement would be a good location regardless. If that thing sparks up, it’ll take out half the building before the fire department shows up.
I use mine as a box spring in my bedroom
Depends on the chemistry. I'd want NMC batteries outside and LFPs can be anywhere.
Im not 100% sure how the batteries are constructed from all of the cells (and I know it depends on the model), but the re-using process can work a lot better than just pulling out the battery and popping it down. EV batteries are in the range of hundreds of volts, but the cells themselves are about 4 volts. It's my understanding that the battery as a whole doesn't uniformly degrade, but you might have individual cells that degrade. If 1 cell in a chain of 10 goes bad, that chain can be made off limits to the battery, so you still technically have 9/10 cells that work fine.
The way a lot of people reuse/recycle/refurb (not sure what the right terminology is in this instance) EV batteries is to test each of the cells themselves, and get rid of the duds, and keep the decent cells. Tesla, for example, all used to use 18650 cells (and I think some models still do), which is the same exact cell that's in decent name-brand cordless power tools.
When you aren't required to keep weight, space, and extra circuitry to a minimum, you can really design a system that squeezes every last drop of usefulness out of those cells before they need to be melted down and remade.
So like... do electric car owners just need to buy new batteries? That's the most expensive part!
Yeah, that's the bit that makes me think there will be a shitload of people cut off from vehicle ownership by the electric revolution.
It's time to end that stupid suburban sprawl, and make places walkable, cyclable, and have subsidised public transport. Because when the petrol age comes to an end, those people left out of the new one will revolt.
Sometimes, but not often. These are mostly 1st gen EV batteries, so they're pretty old. It's mentioned in the article that once capacity diminishes to the point of effecting range the old battery is replaced. Old units can be refurbished. These units could also be situations where the car surrounding the battery failed (accident, hail damage, etc) and they decided to scrap it and reclaim the battery.
At one time, they didn't last more than a few years, and needed expensive replacement. Newer batteries have better BMS controllers on them and last a lot longer. But any damage pretty much necessitates replacement. The batteries can probably be fixed but IDK if they can be put back into use in vehicles then. So there's plenty of used batteries that can be upgraded to use for stationary storage. You can buy them all day long on certain websites or auctions. It's a pretty popular thing for DIY solar.
When they've reached end of life for the car, they are still useful.
EVs require high energy density so they get replaced when they don't store enough energy for their weight. However for grid storage, weight doesn't really matter (at least not as much) so a battery with 80% of its original capacity is a good (and cheap) solution.
When the market is mature, it will good for car owners who need to replace their batteries because the old one still has value.
Think of it like phone batteries, you dont, but overtime, the wear level of the battery is lower than new, and if that range is less than what you need to dailu drive, then people will get their battery swapped.
Its one of the reasons why car companies were hesitent to make lithium ion batteries for EVs
This should make it less expensive if EV owners can sell their old batteries to be turned into a grid battery.
The article mentions that they mostly use batteries from the Nissan Leaf and Honda Clarity. I'm not sure about the latter, but the Nissan Leaf does not have any kind of battery management system. That keeps the battery warm in winter and cool in summer, and helps it last a lot longer. Nearly every major EV on the market does this, but the Leaf is the big exception. It's also the one car where you'll see severe range degradation on an older model.
Sure... at roughly the same rate and/or lifespan as someone with a combustion powered car might need to rebuild their engine or transmission. It's really not that big of a deal, and newer battery chemistries like the current LiFePO packs are continually getting longer and longer lived. BEV battery packs are already expected to last 10 to 20 years.
Engine swap is a few thousand. New battery full swap is close to 20k on a smaller car. Not quite the same.
What an atrociously dangerous planned design.
Net result. It will create another unstoppable fire that will dump poisons into ground water and the air recklessly endangering anyone down wind.
Solutions not problems:
Do you think the engineers haven't thought about that?
Do you think personal safety, firefighting ability, and effects on the environment has informed the design of like… anything in the last 50 years?
“Faster to catch fire, faster to spread, faster to catastrophically fail, more dangerous to life and health, and worse for the environment when it does so” describes anything from modern house construction to vehicle manufacturing.
Priority one is “cheaper”, the rest is just noise.
They actually have not thought of that no. In fact there is a cult like level of ignorance that has already just caused a serious fire & toxic release with this exact same hair brain layout and design. That said the method of fire containment is very new out of the Netherlands I believe.
After hearing jokes about college professors evacuating planes when they hear that their students designed them? Wouldn't put it past em. Even experts make big mistakes.
This is a way to get off gas as it's used for reliability and voltage regulation. There's a few locations running pilots with different energy storage techs like this. One of the main problems with integrating renewables is they aren't dispatchable generation so you're basically throwing unknowns in to the system. This is mediated through programs like demand response and load following with gas, but the goal of decommissioning gas and fossils entirely while still providing reliability is hampered because of this gap in capability. Renewables paired with storage would accommodate more less flexible renewables and SMRs, and allow for more electrification of the economy with less climate impact. More electric arc furnaces!
Imagine that box there gets hit by lightning.
I mean, okay, but how much of anything can get hit by lightning and not be a smoldering crater without proper grounding and such?
One of my grandmothers great uncles.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
