Colin Campbell, CTO of Redwood Materials, discusses near-term deployment targets for repurposing retired electric vehicle batteries into stationary grid storage.
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.”
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 …”
Insight
Second-life EV batteries excel in four-to-twenty-hour long-duration grid storage
“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 beca…”
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…”
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.”
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…”