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Comment by danans | Hacker News Reader

EV batteries can be repurposed for small-scale grid storage applications, and therefore can have a second life for many years before they are finally broken down to raw ingredients for recycling:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-27/where-3-m...

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Do aged lithium batteries lose charge efficiency, discharge efficiency or capacity?

Each loss would encourage different kinds of secondary uses.

Yes. Eventually, Li-Ion batteries will "puff up" due to chemical degradation and may even spontaneously catch fire.

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/55q7py/why_do_l...

This always makes me nervous. If I have some old laptops lying around, how worried should I be about them exploding? Does it only apply if they're in use?

I believe they experience all of those. But yes, there are many secondary uses, especially in situations where high energy density isn't required.

After the last economically viable use for electricity storage, however, there has to be an economic incentive to actually recycle the raw materials. Presumably this is when value of the raw materials exceeds the cost of their reclamation.

>> Do aged lithium batteries lose charge efficiency, discharge efficiency or capacity?

> I believe they experience all of those.

Hmm...would that explain the CPU performance loss of an aging cell phone battery? Lower discharge efficiency = less power available for the CPU = CPU throttles itself to lower power usage?

That is exactly what happened, yes. Without the throttling, the battery can't deliver peak power, and the device crashes.

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