“Degrade” doesn’t mean “dead”. Once a battery pack has lost sufficient capacity to run your car, it will still have a ton of capacity for other applications. If you’re setting up some grid-scale battery storage, if you can get used packs cheaply enough why would you care that they only hold 70% of a charge? If you can buy two (or more) for the price of a single new battery pack you’re coming out way, way ahead.
And even if you then run those until they only hold 20% charge, it’s likely not all of the individual pack cells are evenly holding charge — some are likely going to be much better than others. So you can remove the “better” cells and reuse those in other applications. At once point in Japan Nissan was selling home power packs from reclaimed Leaf cells from “dead” battery packs.
It’s only once the cells get so bad they can’t be used anymore that you have to worry about recycling them. At that point recycling will likely become a closed loop (as it is with lead for lead acid batteries) — you no longer have to mine more lithium, as the cheapest source of lithium will be from dead cells.
We will eventually get to a virtuous cycle with these cells, but it’s going to take quite a while. Most of the EV cells manufactured to date are still in cars on the road. I wouldn’t expect to see significant recycling until maybe 2035 or 2040 at the current rate.
Those are great points! My co worker had a beater prius he bought for 500 bucks a while ago, “dead battery”. He opened up the pack and found 1 or 2 bad cells, replaced them and had a sick commuter! (Granted it looked like previous owners slid cardboard boxes on every flat surface and paint was thrashed) He drove it for years before selling it. Goes to show how far a little elbow grease will go. Believe the previous owner was trading it in because of high cost of replacement pack since a lot of people couldn’t be bothered to open them up! I had not thought about using degraded packs as home storage, that’s an excellent idea. One of these days I want to set up some solar and a battery bank to reduce my grid dependency, and as a bonus have power if we loose grid in a storm. I actually just had a few days of no power due to a rare tornado around here …
I firmly believe home battery is going to become much more prevalent as more and more used EV batteries become available. Based on current driving patterns and what we know about modern EV battery chemistries, packs should still have a lot of good life in them once the rest of the EV has rusted away. Even a pair of 75kWh battery packs that have lost 25% of their capacity (which is quite a lot) is enough to run my home for 6 days. Assuming they’re relatively cheap re-purposing batteries in this way becomes a no brainer.
One thing I’m curious to see is what the market is going to be like for used EV motors. While they can be put to a ton of industrial uses as motors, as they are also configured for regen you could do things like re-use them for power generation. If you live on a property with a decently flowing stream, you could pretty easily wire up an EV motor to generate electricity. Or maybe with the right gearing use them in a windmill. I suspect they’ll find way more uses as motors, but I’m hoping we see enterprising hobbyists find cool ways to re-use them for generating electricity.
Exciting times are ahead — better EV adoption could have a very long tail in terms of how it changes our society (for the better).
“Degrade” doesn’t mean “dead”. Once a battery pack has lost sufficient capacity to run your car, it will still have a ton of capacity for other applications. If you’re setting up some grid-scale battery storage, if you can get used packs cheaply enough why would you care that they only hold 70% of a charge? If you can buy two (or more) for the price of a single new battery pack you’re coming out way, way ahead.
And even if you then run those until they only hold 20% charge, it’s likely not all of the individual pack cells are evenly holding charge — some are likely going to be much better than others. So you can remove the “better” cells and reuse those in other applications. At once point in Japan Nissan was selling home power packs from reclaimed Leaf cells from “dead” battery packs.
It’s only once the cells get so bad they can’t be used anymore that you have to worry about recycling them. At that point recycling will likely become a closed loop (as it is with lead for lead acid batteries) — you no longer have to mine more lithium, as the cheapest source of lithium will be from dead cells.
We will eventually get to a virtuous cycle with these cells, but it’s going to take quite a while. Most of the EV cells manufactured to date are still in cars on the road. I wouldn’t expect to see significant recycling until maybe 2035 or 2040 at the current rate.
Those are great points! My co worker had a beater prius he bought for 500 bucks a while ago, “dead battery”. He opened up the pack and found 1 or 2 bad cells, replaced them and had a sick commuter! (Granted it looked like previous owners slid cardboard boxes on every flat surface and paint was thrashed) He drove it for years before selling it. Goes to show how far a little elbow grease will go. Believe the previous owner was trading it in because of high cost of replacement pack since a lot of people couldn’t be bothered to open them up! I had not thought about using degraded packs as home storage, that’s an excellent idea. One of these days I want to set up some solar and a battery bank to reduce my grid dependency, and as a bonus have power if we loose grid in a storm. I actually just had a few days of no power due to a rare tornado around here …
I firmly believe home battery is going to become much more prevalent as more and more used EV batteries become available. Based on current driving patterns and what we know about modern EV battery chemistries, packs should still have a lot of good life in them once the rest of the EV has rusted away. Even a pair of 75kWh battery packs that have lost 25% of their capacity (which is quite a lot) is enough to run my home for 6 days. Assuming they’re relatively cheap re-purposing batteries in this way becomes a no brainer.
One thing I’m curious to see is what the market is going to be like for used EV motors. While they can be put to a ton of industrial uses as motors, as they are also configured for regen you could do things like re-use them for power generation. If you live on a property with a decently flowing stream, you could pretty easily wire up an EV motor to generate electricity. Or maybe with the right gearing use them in a windmill. I suspect they’ll find way more uses as motors, but I’m hoping we see enterprising hobbyists find cool ways to re-use them for generating electricity.
Exciting times are ahead — better EV adoption could have a very long tail in terms of how it changes our society (for the better).