Used EV Batteries Could Power Tomorrow's Solar Farms

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/batteries-storage/used-ev-batteries-could-power-tomorrows-solar-farms

by headalgorithm • 6 years ago

155 80 6 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

I'm not sure how realistic this is on a commercial scale. There are a bunch of people doing this for their own solar offgrid projects, maybe even a few doing it as a cottage industry. However, I can't really see striping, testing and reconfiguring lithium batteries being a big part of future solar farms.

brianwawok2• 6 years ago

In a few years will be hundreds of thousands of Tesla EV batteries getting to the point they want replaced. If we can find a use for them it’s pretty awesome.

NotSammyHagar• 6 years ago

Tesla has been talking about this for years and I've already read about old ev batteries used for this purpose. So its a good idea.

mikestew3• 6 years ago

Back when Nissan was doing their dog-and-pony show ("come take a test drive!" in a very controlled environment) for the Leaf (2009), that was their exact spiel for what would be done with the batteries when they were past their prime. Now that the early Leafs are at the point of needing new batteries, I'm curious if Nissan is following through (but not curious enough to go looking.)

ragebol2• 6 years ago

Well there you go: https://www.johancruijffarena.nl/default-showon-page/amsterd... (from comment by louwrentius)

Havoc• 6 years ago

Perhaps if the facility is designed with a lot of fault tolerance from the start? Some places aren't short on space so should be fine if you can separate things enough to mitigate fire risk?

ip26• 6 years ago

The farm itself probably wouldn't be doing it, but buying from someone who does.

I find myself thinking of lead acid battery recycling: https://www.energy-storage.news/news/lead-acid-batteries-are...

jotm• 6 years ago

Why not? Refurbishing of household appliances and electronics is a big industry, for example.

fnord77• 6 years ago

Not sure this will happen if these plans of "1 million mile" EV batteries come to fruition.

timerol• 6 years ago

If they are able to be used in cars for a million miles, they will still be able to be used after that at a lower performance. It's likely that a used "million mile" battery will be even more valuable, since it presumably loses performance more slowly than other batteries. So at the point where it's performance drops below "useful in EVs," it will still have a ton of life left before the performance drops below "useful as part of the grid."

rjmunro• 6 years ago

Quite the opposite. Other parts of the car will wear out at 25% of that (or less), so you'll have second use batteries available with 75% of their life still in them. People won't want to build new cars with old batteries for safety concerns, but if these go into containers in a solar farm in a field somewhere, the risks are far less - you won't stress them as much in regular use, and any emergency will be more contained.

louwrentius• 6 years ago

This is done for a soccer stadium in Amsterdam.

https://www.johancruijffarena.nl/default-showon-page/amsterd...

lutostag2• 6 years ago

Glad it doesn't go unnoticed, actually was the team lead for that project (Mobility House -- real time battery control). If you have any questions about it or other cool projects we have done -- https://www.mobilityhouse.com/int_en/magazine/press-releases... actually works with the batteries to do the same thing.

So we can use them in the car to charge when there is excess renewables, and then use the second-life batteries in large stationary storage installations to do the same. Tying into the different grid systems is a bit of a nightmare with everyone having their own standards unfortunately, otherwise it would be easier to roll these out more often.

(I am speaking for myself, not Mobility House).

microdrum2• 6 years ago

With the new gen of software-defined inverters, this makes more and more sense. The inverter's logic knows RT efficiency, depth of charge, and chemical age of the battery. It changes how it treats each and every battery.

Think of batteries like hard drives in a hyperscale datacenter.

coderintherye• 6 years ago

I was curious about this, anyone else who is curious may find this article of interest: https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2019/03/smart-inverter...

It's for inverting electricity at grid-scale, not referring to a household "inverter". Still quite interesting.

microdrum2• 6 years ago

That was interesting.

The IQ inverter is for household and small commercial scale. For example, I would happily team with a few neighbors to cache, say 85kWHr at each home.

jillesvangurp• 6 years ago

There's no shortage of uses for 'used' ev batteries that outlasted the vehicles they were in. They are quite a valuable commodity already. There's all sorts of things you can do with a good quality battery that is still good for a few tens of kwh of storage.

But even when they are still in the car they can be off use to the grid and provide many GW of on demand buffers for both energy shortages and over supply.

There recently have been negative energy rates where electricity producers preferred to not shut down expensive to restart plants and instead ended up incentivizing people to charge their car batteries.

This doesn't even have to be a huge amount of energy per car. Even a single kwh of capacity per day would quickly add up if there's millions of vehicles plugged into the grid.

The same technology can allow the same users to power their house for several days using just a single car and allow them to leverage their own solar panels, get payed to soak up excess grid energy (e.g. at night when wind mills continue producing), deal with grid outages, resell their own solar excess when demand is high, etc.

With million mile batteries, people'll be less concerned about breaking their batteries; especially if they get to spend less on electricity. With leased battery business models, this could be simply part of the deal.

martinald• 6 years ago

This is becoming more and more common in the UK: https://www.energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile-london/ (these are retail prices anyone in the UK with a smart meter can take advantage of).

Basically high wind production with sunlight results in negative pricing. The difference between the 4-8pm "peak" is very high between the rest of the day too.

There is an enormous business opportunity here. Prices are going from -3p/kWh to 25p in the same 24 hours nearly weekly.

kd913• 6 years ago

I wish there were home appliances that could take advantage of this excess supply of electricity. Since 2003 I have been hearing about the concept of the smart grid and yet nothing seems to have particularly materialized.

It's 2020, I wish there was a way for me to somehow schedule my washing machines and dishwasher to run easily other the internet at times of negative energy. Heck why isn't this possibility grid controlled yet? Having a large surplus of consumer appliances controlled by the grid could be a greener easier solution than relying on batteries.

Alas, I still can't even control my washing machine over the internet. If I could, the appliance is expensive and using proprietary 'dumb' apps.

mrgzg14• 6 years ago

Having used one of these used LifePo4 batteries for my van build, https://www.techdirectclub.com/lifepo4-lfp-battery-24-volts-... I'm pretty impressed how much bang for buck I can get compared to traditional lead acid batteries. In future build's I'll resort to just using singular Nissan Leaf battery cells, give more configurability + easy to replace just a dysfunctional cell.

I see a lot of useful tools on van and boat sites, around managing non traditional batteries and interfacing them with solar panels + engine alternators. Off to a cleaner and decoupled from grid future! Micro grids everywhere.

belval2• 6 years ago

Careful with Leaf batteries, they used air for cooling instead of water which means that most cells show significant capacity loss after a few years.

epistasis2• 6 years ago

IIRC, this is highly dependent on the climate in which they were operated. A battery used in Phoenix may have much bigger problems than one from Pacifica.

mrgzg14• 6 years ago

Indeed! More than getting ripped off on capacity, I'm super scared of using large capacity lithium batteries in general. Having seen small samsung phones blow up, I'm a little scared and have a lot of fuses and cut off switches.

outworlder• 6 years ago

Climate and usage dependent.

And it's not even a matter of air vs water, is between being actively thermal managed or not.

walrus01• 6 years ago

This is why the first/second generation Leaf batteries sell for REALLY cheap from used battery dealers. They're generally in poor condition. As compared to harvesting used 18650 cells in the 2500mAh range capacity from other 'used' sources, and building a DIY powerwall that way.

agumonkey• 6 years ago

May I see your van ?

dylan6042• 6 years ago

There's so many different directions for jokes on this comment, but yes, I too would be interested in seeing the mods.

mrgzg14• 6 years ago

I'll dig up a photo of the battery / electronics and post it here soon. To give you an overview of it: - 300W of flexible solar panels (~$90/pop, tend to get about 1.5kWh on great sunny days, enough to power my fan + fridge without having to run the van) - Victron MPPT charge controller (pretty impressed by their quality, and their app that talks to the controller over bluetooth, nothing comes close to them in simplicity of setup) - Victron battery to battery charger without ground isolation (gets triggered by engine hot signal, so I don't drain the van battery) - 2000W cheap inverter for running instantpot / magicbullet. I prefer to have DC appliances, but hard to find DC pressure cooker / mixers - couple of 12v regulators for 12vdc devices - ofc the BYD Lifepo battery, I haven't deep cycled this a ton, but my suspicion is that it's around 3.5kWH usable capacity.

I plan to add a cheap 360 camera system from aliexpress and run it off the aux battery mainly for security monitoring around the vehicle, the standard backup cams on any 2017+ vans are decent. If I get to it, it'd be interesting to get a Pi in there with OBD breakout to read in car data / gimmick.

dylan6042• 6 years ago

Just took a look at the battery listing you provided. I have not seen someone use an actual tape measure showing the HxWxD of the product rather than just listing them. I think I prefer it.

giarc• 6 years ago

I'd rather see the listing. Is the height 9", 10", 11"? Hard to tell because of the angle.

AtlasBarfed• 6 years ago

LFP is rumored to be part of Tesla battery investor day, where the LFP will be used for cheap / standard range cars at $80/kwhr at PACK level, and NMC for higher performance / longer range.

And allegedly LFP is improving density further based on some chinese rumors about CATL's advances in LFP for next year's batteries.

But there's so many rumors...

castratikron• 6 years ago

That is my guess. If you treat a LFP battery well you can probably get 4000 cycles out of it. If one cycle is 250 mi then there's your 1M.

Downsides are lower energy density and higher internal resistance, so it's probably not the battery they would want in one of those super fast Roadsters with the huge range.

zoren• 6 years ago

I thought solar farms produced power.

djsumdog2• 6 years ago

Solar farms still require traditional gas, coal or nuclear plants to provide idle power. Except for certain regions, you can't have consistent solar, and you need to have backup power for brownouts.

The idea with better batteries is that solar stations could provide their own excess capacity storage.

But battery tech is still not good enough for large scale storage. The break down chemically and are not easy to refurbish. The only real "battery" that sorta works is the Racoon Mountain hydro station, which uses extra electricity to pump water into a resistor and then drains it for power during high peaks.

We should be building these all over the country, but they don't really provide that much capacity; plus you kinda destroy the environment around an entire hill and have to build it back up afterwards (Racoon Mtn does have really good mountain biking trails now).

But this is just more fluff to green wash technology that really cannot ever truly replace hydrocarbons. We really need to minimize and reduce energy consumption. That's probably never going to happen.

tonyedgecombe2• 6 years ago

High voltage inter-connectors will help with this. If we wire up the world we won’t need much backup power at all.

ben_w• 6 years ago

They do. But as some people keep complaining, not at night. This can shift the output of a solar farm to when it’s dark.

It might not be literal truth, but it’s close enough to be understood — like saying “this food comes from a supermarket” even though the food actually comes from five different farms in different countries.

djsumdog2• 6 years ago

Used EV batteries could just be used in cars, but Tesla makes it incredibly difficult to fix their crashed vehicles. It's almost impossible for regular consumers to buy OEM parts unless it's for their specific purchased car. This guy has salvaged batteries and tons of other parts from junkyards:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuAMczraBIM

mkchoi212• 6 years ago

This is something I'm super excited about. People should note that people started trying this out long time ago with batteries from used laptops. I believe couple people were even able to create DIY household energy storage solutions with just old battery laptops!

Once the industry figures out the problem of scaling, this could be very impactful.

jeffreyrogers• 6 years ago

How recyclable are these newer battery chemistries? I know that lead acid batteries are fairly easy to recycle, but many of these more exotic ones seem harder to recycle.

TD-Linux• 6 years ago

It is more complicated because there are more compounds to recover, and the batteries have a finer structure, but you can still do a broadly similar process.

Compare lead-acid recycling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxCFDWMPu38

To lithium recycling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxCFDWMPu38

ProZsolt• 6 years ago

Both link are the same

Obi_Juan_Kenobi• 6 years ago

Ultimately, you can smelt them. It's not very economical, but the elements don't go away.

Ideally, you'd be able to 'refresh' the electrode material inexpensively. This involves removing lithium plating from the anode, and oxidized electrolyte from the cathode. This isn't a mature process, and it won't be until battery chemistries and manufacturing get more standardized and scale up. But there aren't strong theoretical reasons why this should be uneconomical. These issues take place at the surface of the electrode grains, and can likely be solved with bulk treatment. It's still going to require a fair amount of work to harvest the electrode material, but materials cost is a large percentage of battery production.

fomine3• 6 years ago

I'm curious why the refresh process is not popular now.

dwighttk• 6 years ago

I was sort of hoping the solar farms would produce power...

gandalfian• 6 years ago

Hot potatoe? Last one left holding the battery pays the disposal costs?

Tade0• 6 years ago

Or sells it off for scrap metal.

Metals such as nickel, cobalt, aluminium and copper make up nearly half of the bill of materials in a li-ion cell.

spiritplumber2• 6 years ago

The humble automotive sealed lead acid battery can also find a second life in a solar setup, be it for a home or a RV. It's a good reuse for truck batteries, I find.

Sure SLA batteries are a mess environmentally, but if you can keep them out of the landfill for a few years this way, why not?

HALtheWise• 6 years ago

My understanding is that if a lead acid battery ends life in the landfill, somebody has seriously messed up. In the US at least, the vast majority of lead from batteries is recycled, usually into fresh batteries, thanks to financial incentives and a very efficient collection system primarily run by auto parts stores. It's unclear to me whether it's actually more efficient to reuse an old lead acid battery, or to recycle its lead into a modern battery with higher capacity, it probably depends on the specific circumstances.

spiritplumber2• 6 years ago

True in the US and Europe, yes. (About 1 on 8 human beings on Earth)

vondur• 6 years ago

So how much life is left in a battery? I assumed they are dead.

adrianN2• 6 years ago

My 11 year old laptop battery still has a third of its capacity left. Car batteries are made to last a long longer than laptop batteries.

manicdee• 6 years ago

Most Teslas will still have more than 80% capacity after a decade.

Chances are the battery is available because the car was written off in an accident, rather than because the batteries are dead.

Used EV Batteries Could Power Tomorrow's Solar Farms

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