The first batches of batteries from electric and hybrid vehicles are
hitting retirement age, yet they aren’t bound for landfills. Instead, they’ll
spend their golden years chilling beer at 7-Elevens in Japan, powering
car-charging stations in California and storing energy for homes and grids in
Europe.
Lithium-ion car and bus batteries can collect and discharge electricity
for another seven to 10 years after being taken off the roads and stripped from
chassis—a shelf life with significant ramifications for global carmakers,
electricity providers and raw-materials suppliers.
Finding ways to reuse the technology is becoming more urgent as the global stockpile of EV
batteries is forecast to exceed the equivalent of about 3.4 million packs by
2025, compared with about 55,000 this year, according to calculations
based on Bloomberg NEF data.
China, where about half the world’s EVs are sold, is implementing rules
in August to make carmakers responsible for expired batteries and to keep them
out of landfills. The European Union has regulations, and the industry expects
the U.S. to follow.
General Motors Co., BMW AG, Toyota Motor Corp., BYD Co. and a clutch of
renewable-energy storage suppliers are among those trying to create an aftermarket and extra
profits for a device that only recently coalesced into its own market. Second
lives generate second revenue streams for the same product, and those could
help lower prices for EVs.
“The car manufacturers have an upcoming problem, and one that we are
already starting to see: this massive volume of batteries,” said Johan
Stjernberg, chief executive officer of Box of Energy AB, a Swedish company
working with Porsche and Volvo Cars. “The market will be enormous for
second-life applications with storage.”
The decade-by-decade forecast by BNEF is staggering.
By 2030, there will be a 25-fold surge in battery demand for EVs. Automobiles
have overtaken consumer electronics as the biggest users of lithium-ion
batteries, according to Paris-based Avicenne Energy. By 2040, more than half of
new-car sales and a third of the global fleet—equal to 559 million
vehicles—will be electric. By 2050, companies
will have invested about $550 billion in home, industrial and grid-scale battery
storage, according to BNEF. “The logic behind this is the circular economy,”
said Cecile Sobole, program manager for Renault SA’s EV business. “The battery
coming from the electric vehicle will become more and more a part of the energy
world.”
Yet as many companies dive in, the biggest U.S. electric-car maker —
Tesla Inc. — stays on the sidelines. The Palo Alto, California-based company
said its batteries probably won’t be suitable for a new task after 10 to 15
years of use, and it’s focusing on recovering the raw materials.Repurposing efforts
may slow if it becomes more profitable to extract materials like cobalt and
simply make new batteries.
Declining performance for
an EV battery is evidenced by fewer miles of driving per charge and more frequent
plug-ins by owners. The components
typically will be swapped out after about a decade in family cars and four
years in harder-working buses and taxis.
While those replaced
batteries can’t run a passenger vehicle, they’re ideal for less-demanding tasks
such as storing electricity from solar panels and wind turbines, and hoarding
power from a regular grid connection when prices are low.
“A lithium-ion battery actually never dies,” said Hans Eric Melin,
founder of London-based Circular Energy Storage Research and Consulting. “It’s
just like you can take an alkaline battery out of your flashlight and put it
into a remote control, and it’ll still be good enough.” By 2025, about
three-quarters of spent EV batteries will be reused and then recycled to harvest
raw materials, Melin said. That means automakers and battery producers such as
China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. can profit from the same pack
several times.
Box of Energy, London-based Powervault Ltd. and Melbourne-based
Relectrify Pty. are among those helping develop the second acts. And a slew of
automakers are either partnering with them or doing it alone.
In the basements of a three-tower apartment complex in western Sweden,
Box of Energy installed silver cabinets about the size of a large refrigerator,
each using 20 battery modules recovered from Volvo hybrid cars. They store
energy from rooftop solar panels to run the elevators and lights in common
areas. “So far, it’s worked without a hitch,” said Lennart Nord, caretaker of
the buildings in Gothenburg.
The technology can cut a household electricity bill by more than a
third, said Powervault, which plans to break down Renault Zoe battery packs for
use in homes and schools in England this summer. Powervault’s dishwasher-sized
units can calculate when it’s most economical to recharge from the grid and
when it’s best to tap into stored power. Jeff Hardy, 44, is putting a
Powervault unit in his Victorian terrace house in southeast London, and he
expects to save about 110 pounds a year. “It can basically supplement my solar
and allow me to do more for free,” said Hardy, an academic and consultant on
the energy sector. “The manufacturing of EV batteries does have an impact on
the environment. The fact that this is a reused product means that it’s really
reducing that footprint.”
Larger-scale systems also can cut costs for businesses. Batteries from
Nissan’s Leaf will soon help illuminate streets in the Japanese coastal town of
Namie, which is recovering from the 2011 disaster at the nearby Fukushima
Daiichi nuclear plant. A new facility sifts through a mattress-sized battery in
four hours to prepare its cells for several applications, including going back
into an EV. Nissan envisions the site eventually churning through 10,000
batteries annually.
Toyota, maker of the Prius hybrid, will install retired batteries
outside 7-Eleven stores in Japan next year. The hybrid batteries will store
power from solar panels, and then use the juice when needed to help run the
drink coolers, fried chicken warmers and sausage grills inside the stores.
A typical EV battery
retains about 50 percent to 70 percent of its power capacity upon removal, said Tom Zhao, managing director of global sales for BYD’s battery
group. The Warren Buffett-backed company uses secondhand packs to power
wireless transmission towers and to help run one of China’s biggest
energy-storage systems in Shenzhen. “If you don’t reuse, it’s a huge waste,”
Zhao said. [rew]
