Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Second-life EV batteries excel in four-to-twenty-hour long-duration grid storage

Colin Campbell · Repurposing EV batteries for grid storage · Jul 24, 2025 · at 23:52

Colin Campbell, CTO of Redwood Materials, explains the technical advantages of deploying degraded EV battery packs in long-duration grid storage systems.

0:00 / 0:38exact quote · 38.4s
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“We can certainly play in the two hour, four hour markets with repurposed EV packs, second life packs. Where we see them really starting to shine, though, is in the longer duration. Markets. So four hour, eight hour, maybe longer, maybe 20 hour. And that's because when you are using these packs at much lower than their rated current, when you're discharging them more slowly, you can tolerate more than you could at the high C rates. So an impedance imbalance things like that become less relevant.”

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More from Colin Campbell

Insight
Second-life EV batteries require just one to two years to become profitable
“The life of the second life battery on the grid is, it's certainly long enough to be economically valuable, and that, in order to make economic sense, it's really one or two years, hundreds of cycles, low hundreds of cycles.”
Colin Campbell Jul 24, 2025 ▶ 11:59 Repurposing EV batteries for grid storage
Disclosure
Redwood repurposes retired EV battery packs without opening them or removing modules
“We do a very brief electrical inspection. Something like five minutes, cell balance impedance check, and we literally wheel it out to the field where we have a spot for it and plug it in. So we are not opening up the packs. We are not removing the modules. We …”
Colin Campbell Jul 24, 2025 ▶ 14:10 Repurposing EV batteries for grid storage
Disclosure
Redwood repurposes 95% of retired EV batteries for grid storage before recycling
“We don't have to choose, right? So we Typically we'll do both. We will send a battery out to a grid scale energy storage site to provide grid services when that is economically sensible, which is 95% of the time, and then we will go on to recover the metals va…”
Colin Campbell Jul 24, 2025 ▶ 11:00 Repurposing EV batteries for grid storage
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Redwood Materials collects over 80% of US end-of-life EV battery packs
“We are already collecting north of 80% of the end of life EV packs across the nation.”
Colin Campbell Jul 24, 2025 ▶ 15:56 Repurposing EV batteries for grid storage
Disclosure
Proprietary power electronics allow Redwood Materials to use any battery chemistry
“We're totally agnostic to chemistry type. So because of the power electronics that we've developed, we can really easily integrate low capacity, high capacity, high nickel, LFP new, old, low voltage, high voltage packs, whatever it is we're ready to plug it in…”
Colin Campbell Jul 24, 2025 ▶ 22:49 Repurposing EV batteries for grid storage
Opinion
Repurposing used LFP batteries for grid storage remains economically viable
“The economics are different for LFP, but they still solve. The metals values are lower. The cycle life is different. The degradation is different. The energy value is different, but it still makes sense to deploy them on the grid used LFP packs.”
Colin Campbell Jul 24, 2025 ▶ 23:16 Repurposing EV batteries for grid storage
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