What will come of old EV batteries? Think energy storage…

Energy storage

From Inside Climate News, 500 “pre-owned” electric vehicle (EV) batteries are soon to provide energy storage for the Texas electric grid. B2U Storage Solutions out of Lancaster, California is heading up the project.

The company has plans for three more facilities of similar size, also in Texas.

B2U began life building industrial scale solar projects and soon recognized the need to store the generated energy for use after dark. Co-founders Freeman and Michael Stern realized that a first wave of commercial EV batteries would be reaching the end of their roughly 10-year automotive life. This equates to roughly a loss of 20% of their storage capacity.

While this may not be enough to keep EV drivers happy, they thought the remaining capacity would be more than enough to store power from the electrical grid and thought that they could build technology to use the battery packs in their original form, avoiding any repurposing costs.

They started by purchasing 300 Nissan Leaf batteries that had been swapped out under warranty and B2U succeeded in creating technology that allows them to use the packs unmodified, creating large-scale storage projects for less.

The stored power stabilizes the grid and saves a good deal of recycling and land fill costs — at least temporarily.

You can see the more detailed Inside Climate News article here.

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