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Comment by megaman821 | Hacker News Reader

Also for utility uses, why is 80% the benchmark? It seems likely that batteries will be used down to 60% capacity; so double the number of cycles for a reduced capacity.

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Also, in a utility-scale battery with literally millions of cells there will always be gradual but constant replacement of a small amount of cells, while the remaining cells continue to bear the load. This is something you can't do in a phone, and what may be too costly in a EV.

It doesn't quite work out for a centralized utility scale battery unless it gets built gradually over the expected lifetime of the component batteries, as most existing infrastructure projects tend to get financed and built all at once, so all the batteries are the same age and are likely to require replacement around the same time. On a small scale that is quite visible with UPS batteries in data centers that all fail at once.

The easiest way to avoid that is to slow things down and build up a decentralized grid scale battery over time through incentives.

A few companies are cropping up to do EV battery repairs so it may be affordable to a consumer.

E.g. https://cedarelectric.co.uk/electric-and-hybrid-battery-repa...

My thoughts are that even after 80% usage the battery still has a second life for use in home power storage. Even after that most of the battery parts can be recycled. I think that battery trade-in schemes will start to become affordable once these reuse and recycling routes are scaled up.

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