Where Used EV Batteries Can Go To Serve

Millions of used electric car batteries will help store energy for the grid. Maybe.

David Roberts, August 29, 2016 (VOX)

“…In four or five years, the batteries in the roughly one and a quarter million EVs currently on the road are going to start to wane. EV owners will either replace them, or replace the cars entirely…One possibility is repurposing the [batteries] to serve as grid-connected energy storage…Once a battery’s performance has degraded by around 30 percent, it could become available for stationary storage [according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF)]…[B]y 2018 these second-life batteries could cost as little as $49 per usable kilowatt-hour to repurpose, compared to the current new stationary battery price today of around $300 per kilowatt-hour. If so, they will further support the economics of both renewable energy and electric vehicles, acelerating the uptake of both…[But JB Straubel, battery expert and CTO of Tesla, questions the idea because there’s] no guarantee the economics will work out…Used batteries have lower energy density than new stationary-storage batteries and won’t last as long…[Also, stationary] storage is cheapest when its constituent battery cells are most uniform…By 2030 or so, 15-year-old batteries coming out of EVs will be competing with new custom-built stationary storage batteries that benefit from the intervening years of research, reduced costs, and increased performance…[But it] won’t be easy…” click here for more

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