Redwood Materials is giving old EV batteries a second life as microgrids

The company said on Thursday that Redwood materials are re -using old EV batteries to energy storage systems that cost “much less” than new storage projects.

The electric car battery recycling and manufacturing project, founded by the chief technology specialist in Tesla, has established a new section called Redwood Energy to manage these projects. The aim is to convert the “but functional” EV batteries “from the recycling and redistribution current to” low -cost, large -scale “that can help in connecting critical gaps in the power network.

Redwood says it receives more than 20 GWH from the batteries annually-the equivalent of 250,000 EVS-, which represents about 90 percent of all lithium ion batteries and recycled battery materials in North America. Often, the batteries you receive for recycling still have a lot of use capacity – up to 50 percent. These are the batteries that are no longer suitable for operating an electric vehicle, but still have enough life to provide some purposes.

So instead of recycling those batteries that are still functional, Redwood turns into fixed storage systems. The company says this will be an increasing opportunity as more EV batteries reach the end of its life. Redwood estimates that more than 100,000 EVS will come out of the road this year alone.

After recovering the battery packages, Redwoods engineers conduct a diagnostic examination to determine whether a candidate is suitable for recovery or recycling. If it is reusable, the package is installed in “flexible unit storage systems” that can work independently or connect to the network. Redwood says it has a “more than Gigawatt” from the resetting batteries in its pipeline, a number that you expect to grow by 5 GB next year.

Redwood has already published the first MicroGrid supported by EV Upcycled batteries. The network, which includes 12 megawatts of power and 63 megawatts of capacity, is located on the company’s campus in Nevada and is used to run a standard data center of 2000 GPU for Crusoe AI. It is called “the largest battery deployment in the second life in the world” with enough energy to run 9,000 homes, support 20 trips from AMTrak between New York and Washington, DC, or charging EV for a 240,000 miles-distance to the moon.

Redwood materials was founded in 2017 by JT Straubel. In addition to destroying the scrap from the process of making batteries in Tesla with Panasonic, Redwood also recycled batteries from Ford, Toyota, Nissan, Specialized, Amazon, Lyft, Rad Power Pikes, LIME, fixed storage facilities and others. The company also produces Anodes and Cathuds, critical battery components, at a facility in South Carolina.