
Used EV Batteries Could Power Tomorrow's Solar Farms - headalgorithm
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/batteries-storage/used-ev-batteries-could-power-tomorrows-solar-farms
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jillesvangurp
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
This is becoming more and more common in the UK: [https://www.energy-
stats.uk/octopus-agile-london/](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
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.

~~~
epistasis
I think that it's unlikely that exposing individual consumers to such highly
variable pricing will induce much change in consumer behavior. It's just so
much to think about, with absolutely tiny potential cost benefit for the
consumer.

However, high prices are unbounded, and I think that it's easier to respond to
those signals than to respond to a signal from low selectivity prices.

In California (and maybe other places?), companies like OhmConnect are
facilitating demand response. A third party bundles together lots of homes'
potential drops in demand, then sells that drop in demand back to the utility
when they would otherwise use expensive and highly polluting leaker plants.

This gets around several market challenges: 1) consumers don't trust utilities
and won't believe that they are acting in their best interest. 2) OhmConnect
can advertise the environmental benefits to consumers, something that
utilities are loathe to do, and 3) it lessens management load on the
utilities, who are not used to dealing with data challenges like that, 4) a
third party is much more likely to be able to experiment with UX (eg
gamificaion) than a staid, highly-regulated utility company.

~~~
adrianN
I think this will get better as more heating is done electrically. A hot water
tank, or a house, stores a surprising amount of energy and the heater has a
few degrees of wiggle room to intelligently decide when to activate. I think
the amounts of energy used for heating are large enough that end-consumers
will care about price differences.

~~~
atupis
Also cooling -> lots of energy -> cool your house 16C instead of 17C.

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mrgzg1
Having used one of these used LifePo4 batteries for my van build,
[https://www.techdirectclub.com/lifepo4-lfp-
battery-24-volts-...](https://www.techdirectclub.com/lifepo4-lfp-
battery-24-volts-5-63-kwh-220-ah-battery-pack-ev-golf-solar-with-bms/) 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.

~~~
belval
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.

~~~
mrgzg1
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.

~~~
belval
To be fair, there is no real contest between a good LiFePO4 cell and some
Samsung battery as thermal runaway on the former is near impossible in normal
conditions.

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djsumdog
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuAMczraBIM)

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louwrentius
This is done for a soccer stadium in Amsterdam.

[https://www.johancruijffarena.nl/default-showon-
page/amsterd...](https://www.johancruijffarena.nl/default-showon-
page/amsterdam-arena-more-energy-efficient-with-battery-storage-.htm)

~~~
lutostag
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...](https://www.mobilityhouse.com/int_en/magazine/press-releases/the-
mobility-house-groupe-renault-realizing-first-smart-electric-ecosystem-porto-
santo-island.html) 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).

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microdrum
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
I was curious about this, anyone else who is curious may find this article of
interest: [https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2019/03/smart-
inverter...](https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2019/03/smart-inverters-
redefine-relationship-ders-grid/)

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

~~~
microdrum
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.

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jeffreyrogers
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
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxCFDWMPu38)

To lithium recycling:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxCFDWMPu38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxCFDWMPu38)

~~~
ProZsolt
Both link are the same

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mkchoi212
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.

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spiritplumber
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
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.

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

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VBprogrammer
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.

~~~
brianwawok
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
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.

~~~
hinkley
I think the problem is mostly logistics. To get good use out of an old array,
you have to QA all of the cells and discard the worst ones, because when you
wire batteries in sequence (to get higher voltage), then the weakest link
effect is very prominent. And if memory serves, to get the most out of a
battery array you want to 'match' the cells, so you have to bin the used
batteries the same way Intel bins CPUs.

If memory serves, you have to charge a battery to measure this, which takes
time and therefore space.

So to get the cost to be cheaper than just building a new pack (possibly using
binned new packs), this all has to be pretty automated. If they bin new cells
(if they don't maybe they should!), then most of this hardware would already
exist. Which would mean you only need to talk about how to make a robot to
desolder battery packs. Given how crap my soldering skills are this feels like
a potentially hard or at least expensive problem.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I saw a film about battery recycling recently and the first thing they have to
do with incoming cells is discharge them. They were using the energy to power
the site. Clearly it wouldn’t be much more work to cycle the batteries.

~~~
hinkley
I recall something like that too, but they worked it a bit like a counter-flow
heat exchanger - drain one batch of cells to charge another.

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

~~~
manicdee
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.

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

~~~
Tade0
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.

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zoren
I thought solar farms produced power.

~~~
djsumdog
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.

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

~~~
toomuchtodo
Would really love to see HVDC cables laid alongside undersea fiber, saves on
deployment costs. Oceanic version of “Dig Once”.

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

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fnord77
Not sure this will happen if these plans of "1 million mile" EV batteries come
to fruition.

~~~
rjmunro
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.

