Can “second life” EV batteries work as grid-scale energy storage?
volts.wtf
volts.wtf
If EV batteries last 20+ years in EV's, it'll be > 2040 before there are significant numbers of EV batteries available to recycle or reuse.
Low cost modules allow one to do away with things like optimally tilted modules and single axis tracking. The modules can also be tightly packed, reducing mounting and wiring costs.
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal-copy
https://austinvernon.substack.com/p/building-ultra-cheap-ene...
A typical house in Midwest needs around 22,000kWh (7.913×10^10 J) over the winter (75 million BTU - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=57321 ).
If we assume the delta of 550 degrees (600 down to 50), you'll need: 7.913×10^10 J / (550K * 1000Jkg^-1K^-1) = 143,872,727 kg of material in your pile. This is a ridiculously stupid number. And I don't see any obvious mistakes?
A more worthy criticism is that the pile for just a single house is too small and would cool off too quickly.
When doing calculations like this I just fire up a lisp and enter the thing to be calculated as lisp form.
You have: 7.913e10 J / 550K / (1J/g/K)
You want: kg
* 143872.73
/ 6.9505876e-06
> An excavator could be used to dig anywhere from 350 to 1,000 cubic yards per day, depending on a number of factors including bucket capacity, type of ground, operator skill and efficiency level, and more. (...)
> One of the biggest factors that impact how much an excavator can dig in one day is the unit’s bucket size, which typically ranges from 0.5 to 1.5 cubic yards of bucket capacity. Most common regular-size excavators have a 1 cubic yard bucket capacity, and mini excavators are closer to the 0.5 cubic yard capacity.
So, with this number, we're talking about a few hours of work for a "mini excavator". https://www.bigrentz.com/rental-locations/pennsylvania/pitts... tells us that a "4,000 lb. mini excavator" rents for US$197 per day. So the expense of moving the dirt is not really significant, compared to other household projects such as replacing the roof, insulating the walls, or repainting the exterior.
Standard Thermal mentions that they are in effect firing the clay in the ground, that they've had significant trouble with resistance-heater reliability, and that their objective is to power steam-turbine power stations with the stored heat. These three facts lead me to believe that they're targeting a temperature closer to 1000° than to 600°.
Oh, apparently because of "dramatic improvements in power plant performance":
> Starting with the traditional 2400 psi / 1000 F (165 bar / 538 C) single-reheat cycle, dramatic improvements in power plant performance can be achieved by raising inlet steam conditions to levels up to 4500 psi/310 bar and temperatures to levels in excess of 1112 F/600 C. It has become industry practice to refer to such steam conditions, and in fact any supercritical conditions where the throttle and/or reheat steam temperatures exceed 1050 F/566 C, as “ultrasupercritical”.
https://www.gevernova.com/content/dam/gepower-new/global/en_...
Anyway, those are the plants that Standard Thermal wants to sell their product/service to. And once the hot dirt falls below 600°, it can no longer heat the water to 600°. So I think they have to be aiming far above that temperature, which is also why heating element reliability is a challenge and why the clays in the soil are firing (a phenomenon which only happens at 600° for the lowest-firing terra-cotta clays, more typically requiring 1000°–1400°).
https://www.powermag.com/coal-fired-generation-cost-and-perf...
Imagine a pile with long pipes through it. Cool fluid is introduced at one end; the steam is gradually heated as it travels down the pipes, emerging as hot steam at the end. If needed, gang two of these together with the second pile acting to top off the temperature from the first one (or more than two).
So, during discharge, a wave of cold sweeps down the pile(s), while the pile near the outlet end stays pretty hot. Only when most of the piles are discharged does the temperature decline.
The Standard Thermal approach is described as heating the piles with embedded resistive heaters, but it could also use an external heater that sends in steam in the opposite direction from when it discharges. This would turn the system into a giant counterflow heat exchanger. Counterflow heat exchangers are known for their high performance, enabling almost all the delta-T between two fluid streams to be interchanged.
The only drawback is that, when you're heating the pile, most of the time you are only heating part of it (the cold part), so your heating elements need to have a significantly higher power capacity, assuming you're heating the pile with embedded resistors as described, rather than with a heat transfer fluid as you suggest.
I don't think you want the heat transfer fluid in the dirt pile to be steam; that would involve making the pipes through the hot dirt resistant to both pressure and steam corrosion, which would make them expensive. It also means you'd have a high-pressure steam leak deep inside the dirt pile when they did fail, which would probably cause damage to other pipes and to resistors and a significant uncontrolled heat transfer from the zone of the leak to other parts of the dirt pile. I think you want a more relaxing atmospheric-pressure heat transfer fluid that allows you to use cheap pipes, or even no pipes. Air, for example. Solar salt can reach those temperatures, and it has a much larger heat capacity, but it's fairly corrosive.
For a seasonal thermal store, also, we're talking about astoundingly low power densities, so low-density heat transfer fluids like air should be fine. If we're cooling the hot dirt from 600° down to 100° over a 3-month low-sun season, and the dirt is 1J/g/K, we're only extracting 63 watts per tonne, which at 1.3 tonnes of dirt per cubic meter is 80 watts per cubic meter. My human body is largely air-cooled and generates about 800 watts per tonne in normal operation, even without forced air.
I think steam would have better heat transfer properties than air, maybe?
I do wonder how much we should worry about oxidation of the pipes. Stainless is certainly fine at 600 C in an oxidizing atmosphere, but what about cheaper steel?
Still big number.
I'll work out some rough figures.
Let's say your house is pretty big and badly insulated, so we want an average of 5000 watts of heating around the clock with a time constant on the order of 10 hours, and we don't want our heating element to go over 700°. (Honest-to-God degrees, not those pathetic little Fahrenheit ones.) That way we don't have to deal with the ridiculous engineering issues Standard Thermal is battling. There's a thermal gradient through the sand down to room temperature (20°) at the surface. Suppose the sand is in the form of a flat slab with the heating element just heating the center of it, which is kind of a worst case for amount of sand needed but is clearly feasible. Then, when the element is running at a 100% duty cycle, the average sand temperature is 360°. Let's say we need to store about 40 hours of our 5000W. Quartz (cheap construction sand) is 0.73J/g/K, so our 720MJ at ΔT averaging 340K is 2900kg, a bit over a cubic meter of sand. This costs about US$100 depending mostly on delivery costs.
The time constant is mostly determined by the thickness of the sand (relative to its thermal diffusivity), although you can vary it with the fan. The heating element needs to be closely enough spaced that it can heat up the sand in the few hours that it's powered. In practice I am guessing that this will be about 100mm, so 1.5 cubic meters of sand can be in a box that's 200mm × 2.7m × 2.7m. You can probably build the box mostly out of 15m² of ceramic tiles, deducting their thermal mass from the sand required. In theory thin drywall should be fine instead of ceramic if your fan never breaks, but a fan failure could let the surface get hot enough to damage drywall. Or portland cement, although lime or calcium aluminate cement should be fine. You can use the cement to support the ceramic tiles on an angle iron frame and grout between them if necessary.
7.5m² of central plane with wires 100mm apart requires roughly 27 2.7m wires, 75m, probably dozens of broken hair dryers if you want to recycle nichrome, though I suspect that at 700° you could just use baling wire, especially if you mix in a little charcoal with the sand to maintain a reducing atmosphere in the sand pore spaces. (But then if it gets wet you could get carbon monoxide until you dry it out.) We're going to be dumping the whole 720MJ thermal charge in in under 9 hours, say 5 hours when the sunshine is at its peak, so we're talking about maybe 40kW peak power here. This is 533 watts per meter of wire, which is an extremely reasonable number for a wire heating element, even a fairly fine wire in air without forced-air cooling.
If we believe https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-93054-w/tables/1 the thermal conductivity of dry sand ranges from 0.18 W/m/K to 0.34 W/m/K. So if we have a linear thermal gradient from our peak design temperature of 700° to 20° over 100mm, which is 6800K/m, we should get a heat flux of 1200–2300W/m² over our 15m² of ceramic tiles, so at least 18kW, which is more than we need, but only about 3×, so 200mm thickness is in the ballpark even without air blowing through the sand itself. (As the core temperature falls, the heat gradient also falls, and so does the heat flux. 720MJ/18kW I think gives us our time constant, and that works out to 11 hours, but it isn't exactly an exponential decay.) Maybe 350mm would be better, with corresponding increases in heating-element spacing and decreases in wire length and box surface area and footprint.
To limit heat loss when the fan is off, instead of a single humongous wall, you can split the beast into 3–6 parallel walls with a little airspace between them, so they're radiating their heat at each other instead of you, and cement some aluminum foil on the outside surfaces to reduce infrared emissivity. The amount of air the fan blows between the walls can then regulate the heat output over at least an order of magnitude. (In the summer you'll probably want to leave the heating element off.)
The sand, baling wire, aluminum foil, lime cement, angle irons, charcoal, thermocouples, power MOSFETs, microcontroller, fans, and ceramic tiles all together might work out to US$500. But the 40kW of solar panels required are about US$4000 wholesale, before you screw them to your siding or whatever. At US prices they'd apparently be US$10k.
720MJ is 200kWh in cursed units, so this is about US$2.50/kWh. Batteries are about US$80/kWh on the Shanghai Metals Market.
What do you think?
Having said that: a good design for sand batteries would use insulated silos, pushing/dropping sand into a fluidized bed heat exchanger where some heat transfer gas is intimately mixed with it. This is the NREL concept that Babcock and Wilcox was (still is?) exploring for grid storage, with a round trip efficiency back to electricity of 54% (estimated) using a gas turbine. Having a separate heat exchanger means the silos don't have to be plumbed for the heat exchange fluid or have to contain its pressure.
Getting the sand back to the top (where it will be heated and dropping into silos) is a problem that could be solved with Olds Elevators, which were only recently invented (amazingly).
I agree that local dirt is much cheaper than trucked-in construction sand, but I think my design sketch above shows that a "sand battery" whose only moving parts are fans will be about 30× cheaper than a real battery at household scale, even though the sand is still most of the estimated cost. A "sand battery" designed to power a steam turbine is a much more difficult problem to solve, but in this case the stated problem is just that it's 24°F (-3°) outside, so I think much cheaper solutions are fine, with no pressure vessels, stainless steel, insulated silos, sand conveyors, or heat transfer fluids other than garden-variety air.
Do you have a good handle on the pressure (and therefore power) requirements for getting air to flow upward through sand? I feel like you ought to be able to get a pretty decent amount of thermal power out of half a tonne of sand with a really minimal amount of pumping, but that's only a gut feeling. Definitely as you go to graded-granulometry gravel the required head drops off to almost nothing.
Thanks for the link to the Olds device! That's utterly astounding. Archimedes could have used it for raising sand, although making a sturdy enough tube out of wood might have been a bit of a chore.
Better idea: put 9 2.7-meter wires in parallel on each of the three circuits, so each wire can have 9×0.173Ω = 1.56 Ω = 0.58Ω/m. That's 32-gauge copper magnet wire, 0.2mm diameter, 0.54Ω/m; or its thicker equivalent in other metals. Iron's resistivity is 5.7 times copper's, so you need a 5.7 times thicker wire: 0.5mm, 24-gauge. Nichrome is 11 times the resistivity of iron, so you'd need 1.6-mm-diameter nichrome.
I don't know, I think the copper would probably melt faster than the sand could conduct the heat away from it, and the nichrome would definitely be fine, but too expensive. But you can extrapolate from this how to solve the problem: by shortening the distance along the heating wires to low-resistance busbars (possibly made of rebar or leftover angle iron) and thus increasing the number of parallel paths, you allow the use of higher-resistance-per-unit-length and thus cheaper and more workable heating elements; the limit of this lightweighting is that the wires' surface area in contact with the sand must cool them enough to prevent melting. By this method you can use a small amount of a conductor of any resistivity at all, limited mainly by the temperature.
All these metals are fine at 700°, or for that matter 1000°. Copper will have less of a tendency to oxidize than iron, which would require a reducing atmosphere, and nichrome will oxidize but remain protected by its oxidation. (A reducing atmosphere will destroy nichrome.) But, at a lower temperature still, like 600°, you could use 10μm thick household aluminum foil, which is much easier to work with than any kind of 20μm wire, but has a similar ratio of surface area to volume. It has 54% more resistivity than copper, so a 10μm × 1mm strip is 2.7 ohms per meter. Our previous objective of 0.58Ω/m is a 4.6mm-wide-strip, which transfers heat to the sand along its 9.2mm perimeter, like a 10-gauge wire. 75m × 4.6mm is the size of about 5 or 6 pages of A4 paper cut into strips.
Cheaper than nichrome and copper. I feel like mild steel would not last long in practice.
Copper plated MIG welding wire might be good enough?
Probably want to think about thermal expansion also, especially configured as "walls", and with skins considerably colder than cores.
And the old standby for resistive heating of giant piles of dirt, for example to bake it into carborundum, isn't a metal at all—it's plain old carbon, which you can if necessary bake in situ. Carborundum itself can also work, though it's not malleable, and controlling its resistivity can be tricky.
MIG welding wire is an interesting possibility.
The main potential obstacle, I think, is the manufacturing cost, and as sandy234590 was saying, potentially durability in use. Vernon said resistor durability had been one of their major problems; I'd think that sand would impose less stress on the resistors than generic dirt, but, with quartz in particular, you could greatly reduce the risk by not crossing the quartz dunting temperature at 573°: https://digitalfire.com/glossary/quartz+inversion That obviously isn't an option for Standard Thermal, but it would be completely viable for household climate control, just requiring somewhat more sand.
Sandy points out, implicitly, that mild steel such as the baling wire I suggested typically does not last long at high temperatures. But that's because it oxidizes. The same vulnerability is present in most metals, though not silver, gold, platinum, and platinum/iridium alloys, and only to a limited extent for nickel, nichrome, and other stainlesses. That oxidation can only happen in an oxidizing atmosphere; the thin iron ballast wires in Nernst lamps last indefinitely because they're sealed in a reducing (hydrogen) atmosphere. As I said, I think you can maintain a reducing atmosphere in the sand pore space by just including a little charcoal, which will scavenge any oxygen that gets close to the heating elements when they're hot, and may even be able to reduce any oxide that does form, at the cost of carbon monoxide emission.
If the atmosphere inside the sand is oxidizing, you'd probably want to either use something that won't be damaged by oxidization, such as gold or nichrome, or use a very thick heating element such as carbon so that it will have an adequate service life despite the oxidation. Most stainless steels will start to oxidize at a few hundred degrees, even though they're fine at room temperature.
(The main heating element in Nernst lamps, cubic zirconia, was also immune to oxidation, but it had some other drawbacks; for example, it needed to be preheated into its conductive range with a platinum preheat wire, and its rather aggressive negative temperature coefficient of resistance made it prone to thermal runaway when operated on a constant-voltage source—thus the iron ballast wire.)
of course things arenot actually linear on temperature but as a rough estimate it gets the point across.
But the heat pump doesn't save you 10kW over resistive heating when it's running full-tilt. It saves you 10-3 = 7kW. So it costs 39¢ per watt of saved energy, which is 6 times as much as the solar panels.
In some simplified theoretical sense, if you decide you need another 10kW of heating for your house, you could spend US$2700 on this heat pump, and also buy 3000 Wp of solar panels to power it, costing US$194, for a total cost of US$2894. Or you could buy 10000 Wp of solar panels, costing US$645, and a resistive wire, costing US$10, for a total cost of US$655. US$655 is almost five times cheaper than US$2894. (4.4 times cheaper.)
There are a lot of factors that this simplified cost estimate overlooks; for example:
• Maybe you need to run the heater 16 hours a day but you only get sunlight 7 hours a day, either because it's winter in Norway, or because there are tall pine trees that shade your property most of the day, and you can't put the panels up on the trees. So maybe in some sense one watt of peak heater output is worth 2.3 watts of peak solar panel output. Or maybe it's the other way around, where your house only needs active heating during a few hours at night, so one watt of peak heater output is only worth 0.43 watts of peak solar panel output.
• The prices are in different countries. Solar panels are more expensive in the US, even wholesale.
• US$2700 is the retail price of the heat pump, including installation and warranty, and 6.5¢/Wp is the wholesale price of low-cost solar panels with no warranty ("Minderleistungs-Solarmodule, B-Ware, Insolvenzware, Gebrauchtmodule, PV-Module mit eingeschränkter oder ohne Garantie, die in der Regel auch keine Bankability besitzen.") Even in Europe the retail price of solar panels is three or four times this.
• Driving a resistive heating element from solar panels is considerably easier than driving a heat pump from solar panels; adapting a heating element to run on lower voltage is just a matter of connecting more wires to the middle of it, while adapting a heat pump to run on lower voltage may involve redesigning the whole power supply board or even rewinding the motor. Which is in a hermetically sealed refrigerant circuit, by the way, which you'd have to reseal. In practice, you'd just buy an inverter, but a 3000-watt inverter is expensive.
• As you said, for sensible-heat thermal storage, the heat pump craps out at about 50° or 60°, while any garden-variety resistive heating element (plus a lot of crappy improvised ones) will be just fine at 600° or 700°. That means you need ten times as much thermal mass for the same amount of storage. Sand is dirt cheap, but once you get into the tens of tonnes, even dirt isn't really cheap.
Despite such complications, I still think that pair of numbers is a useful summary of the situation: the heat pump costs 39¢ per watt saved, while the solar panel costs 6.5¢ per watt produced.
Even if they don't have surplus electricity all the time.
Unless you're just bolting them to the floor or to an uninsulated wall, mounting will (sadly) run you a sizable fraction of that cost in the best case.
But yeah, at the end of the day, just bent bars of aluminum with ground screws and bolts to hold the corners of the panels, versus the technological marvels of the solar panels they hold.
(Asking because I genuinely don't know, not because I have a specific answer in mind.)
Those old panels have to go somewhere and still have at least 2/3 of their life left. Probably more because we're finding out that well-made panels do not degrade as quickly as previously thought.
The used panel market (in the US anyway) might dry up soon if the tariffs stay in place, as that will make a lot of customers reluctant to upgrade due to greatly increased costs. But I guess we'll see. I've been wrong before.
David Roberts
When did automotive batteries become the majority of your input by volume?
Colin Campbell
That is a good question.
David Roberts
Was it recent or was that early on?
Colin Campbell
I would say the transition to EV batteries dominating what we received, it’s been in the last year or 18 months.
David Roberts
So the front edge of a very large wave of batteries has begun to arrive?
Colin Campbell
Yeah, the wave is out there, it’s coming. The waters have finally started to arrive at the beach here.
Sure, so while not supplying power to a city, they are proving this is viable. Just because it's not "turn off the coal plants now" moment doesn't mean this isn't a very good direction. Everyone has to start and grow. I don't understand the whole shit on something because it's not an immediate solve. If these guys waited until 2040 to start the business, well, that'd just be dumb. It essentially sounds like capacity will just continue to increase year over year, maybe around 2040 there will be a huge spike. Doesn't seem like anything is wrong here.
When EVs with good battery pack engineering started hitting the streets, they outperformed those early projections by a lot. And by now, it's getting clear that battery pack isn't as much of a concern - with some of the better designs, like in early Teslas, losing about 5-15% of their capacity over a decade of use.
LiPo batteries were quiet expensive when it was initially released. NiMH was really the only option in town.
And with a lower energy density battery that's also heavier, adding a cooling system would have also added a bunch of weight to the already heavy car with a barely usable range of 100 miles.
Gen 2, however, had no excuses. They had every opportunity to add active cooling and they still decided to go with just air cooling.
I use it in my driveway to make it look to thieves like someone is home (round me, houses with no car get broken into).
It seems like procuring the battery is not as expensive as the Tesla battery (I see someone who did it themselves for $6k on Youtube with the battery from a wrecked leaf). In comparison, the cost I see for my Model 3 is about ~$18k CAD.
Getting a car up and running for $8k might be worth it if it is otherwise dependable, but I've only heard unfortunate stories about the first gen Leaf.
Edit: Checking Wikipedia to verify my information, I found out that Nissan actually sold a lithium-battery EV in 1997 to comply with the same 90s CARB zero-emissions vehicle mandate that gave us the GM EV-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_R%27nessa#Nissan_Altra
Even just looking at online media reports[2][3] clearly sourced from some exact same press event, it is obvious that US English equivalents are much lighter in content than Japanese versions. They're putting the information out, no one's reading it. It's just been the types of information that didn't drive clicks. Language barrier would have effects on it too, that Toyota is a Japanese company and US is an export market, but it's fundamentally the same phenomenon as citizen facing government reports that never gets read and often imagined as being "hidden and withheld from public eyes", just a communication issue.
1: https://www.toyota.com/priuspluginhybrid/features/mpg_other_...
2: https://www.motortrend.com/news/toyota-aqua-prius-c-hybrid-b...
I was looking up this year's Corolla a while ago and likewise there was minimal info that I could see about the battery capacity, which I think I figured out was about 3kWh.
It's under Weights/Capacities but you have to expand the section yourself, no way to link directly to it.
/out
The Lizard pack in the later Nissan Leafs has held up surprisingly well. I have a 2015 that still gets 75 miles of range. I'm sure they thought it wasn't necessary and they probably had the actuarial numbers to justify it.
https://coolienergy.com/lfp-vs-nmc-batteries-the-science-beh...
Depth of discharge and charge rate affect LFP specifically in such a way that if you keep them a good margin above cutoff voltage, relatively cool (60C and under, and do 1C and lower charging you can get 10,000 cycles per their data sheets. The same sheets will also list lower cycle counts for harder use that lines up with the standards used for earlier cells. Basically I think we’ll find a lot of gently to moderately used hardware will last a long time.
Whatever a believable use case looks like will probably end up on those data sheets and it wouldn’t surprise me if we see 15,000 and 20,000 cycles advertised for cells intended in low charge and discharge use cases (probably not cars but maybe home energy storage).
My Taycan has an ongoing battery issue relating to LG Pouch cells but its construction rather than composition that is the culprit. The same compositions from LG in prismatic and cylindrical models, the only models they sell now, so far haven’t been a mess for car makers.
I suspect it'll die due to rust. But yes, might take a while. Even in Denmark where we salt the roads in a winter.
Edit: part of that is that a Prius with 250,000 miles needing its second battery replacement is still a valuable car with a reasonable expectation of a lot more miles. OTOH a Tesla at 250,000 miles needing its first battery replacement...
Similarly Chrysler hybrid owners spend less money on battery replacements than Toyota hybrid owners. Not a compliment, it means they're scrapping their cars earlier.
This low maintenance cost thing is BS once something actually goes wrong. And it’s awfully frustrating / sus when it happens the moment the warranty ends
My 2017’s HV fuse went just days before the warranty ended. They tried to charge me $330 for that planned part.
These things aren’t cheap.
We had this article from Elektrek [1] about battery issues in South Korea. When I asked my local electric maintenance shop [2, sorry for the FB link], they said they have started seeing the same issue in Model 3s and Ys in Canada as well. (They also said that it is too early to tell how common it would become)
This may bode well for recycling since the issues is an unbalance, not the whole pack failing.
[1] https://electrek.co/2025/10/14/tesla-is-at-risk-of-lossing-s...
[2] https://www.facebook.com/groups/albertaEV/posts/248558844207...
"many of these vehicles are now out of warranty, as they sometimes exceed the maximum mileage"
They have good numbers for the number of affected vehicles, but the best they can do for out-of-warranty stats is "many" and "sometimes". Convenient.
~To be fair this applies to a lot of popular tech sites I used to respect. Dunking on Tesla is its own industry these days, it seems.
(I also find it difficult to separate noise from signal about Tesla. However, I don't consider them innocent victims; besides the elephant in the room, they literally eliminated their PR department)
Are you suggesting Tesla is criticized without good reason?
https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1e3onbp/c...
I think Tesla deserves credit for rethinking hat model into chassis-life battery packs and surpluses rather than recovered cells for grid storages.
Especially considering that, resales of Gen1 Leafs milked for EVs and renewables incentives is like destination fees atrocious. You can find fairly zero-milage ones with a functional 100-yard battery pack on sale for couple hundred dollars in some places. Even crashed wrecks of a Tesla cost magnitudes more.
I was stuck in traffic behind an 87 caddy yesterday. It was not a collector car. That chassis is still on the road, seemed to be taking kids to school.
there are exceptions, though.
How many km's on the clock, and how often do you fast charge if you dont mind me asking?
To me that SOH stat sounds really bad!
To me this is perfectly reasonable degradation after 7 years of ownership with the number of miles I have.
There is also just an element of luck that's involved. Batteries degrade at different rates and there's not really any accounting for it.
If I were to guess, the main factor harming the battery is my garage gets pretty hot in the summer (37 or 38C)
Do you leave it fully charged for long periods of time, or do you discharge it down to empty or nearly empty quite regularly?
I don't often fully discharge, that's bad for the lipos. I usually keep a 40-70 range SOC.
"most people" even now are just parroting dumb FUD they read on facebook. You really shouldn't give any weight to the opinions of laypeople on topics that are as heavily propagandized and politically charged as renewable energy.
Tesla has an 8-year battery and drivetrain warranty but they don't necessarily fail after that date.
Anecdotal forum posts are not a great source of statistical data.
What is c in this context?
And already, solar plus storage is cheaper than new nuclear. And solar and storage are getting cheaper at a tremendous rate.
It's hard to imagine a scenario where fusion could ever catch up to solar and storage technology. It may be useful in places with poor solar resources, like fission is now, but that's a very very long time from now.
The AI arms race, which has become an actual arms race in the war in Ukraine, needs endless energy all times a day.
China is already winning the AI cold war because it adds more capacity to its grid a year than Germany has in a century.
If we keep going with agrarian methods of energy production don't be surprised that we suffer the same fate as the agrarian societies of the 19th century. Any country that doesn't have the capability to train and build drones on mass won't be a country for long.
China is winning the AI Cold war because it's adding solar, storage, and wind at orders of magnitude more than nuclear.
I'm not sure who's doing your supposed "envisioning" but there is no vision for cheap abundant energy from fusion. Solar and storage deliver it today, fusion only delivers it in sci fi books.
Nuclear is 20th century technology that does not fit with a highly automated future. With high levels of automation, construction is super expensive. You want to spend your expensive construction labor on building factories, not individual power generation sites.
Building factories for solar and storage lets them scale to a degree that nuclear could never scale. Nuclear has basically no way of catching up.
I blame these for the unquestioned belief that fusion is desirable. It's a trope because it enables stories to be told, and because readers became used to seeing, not because science fiction has a good track record on such things.
The fact that the volumetric power density of ARC is 40x worse than a PWR (and ITER, 400x worse!) should tell one that DT fusion at least is unlikely to be cheap.
With continued progress down the experience curve, PV will reach the point where resistive heat is cheaper than burning natural gas at the Henry Hub price (which doesn't include the cost of getting gas through pipelines and distribution to customers.) And remember cheap natural gas was what destroyed the last nuclear renaissance in the US.
Okay, sure, burning lignite and using the exhaust as air heating in the children's hospital. You got me.
Solar and wind capacity had shot through the roof in the last five years because they can't sell hardware to the west any more.
The other big item is hydro power, which China has a ton of untapped potential for. Unfortunately for the West every good river has already been damed so we can't follow them there.
"can't sell hardware??" hah! I've never heard that weird made-up justification, where did you pick it up from?
China installed 277GW of solar in 2024, capacity factor corrected that's 55.4 GW of solar power. That's equivalent to the entire amount of nuclear that China has ever built. One year versus all time. And then in the first half of 2025, China installed another 212GW of solar. In six months.
Nuclear is a footnote compared to the planned deployment of solar and wind and storage in China.
Anybody who's serious about energy is deploying massive amounts of solar, storage, and some wind. Some people that are slow to adapt are still building gas or coal, but these will be stranded assets far before their end of life. Nuclear fusion and fission are meme technologies, unable to compete with the scale and scope that batteries and solar deliver every day. This mismatch grows by the month.
The problem is not just the mean capacity factor, but the capacity factor in _winter_. It's terrible for China, less than 15%. And more importantly, you can have _weeks_ with essentially zero solar power when you need it most.
Trying to explain that a grid build by electrical engineers, rather than financial engineers, has resilience build in to people whose whole idea about electricity generation is greenwashed bullshit from McKinsey and Co is at best a waste of time and at worst an excellent way to raise one's blood pressure.
55.4 GW per 277 GW is an (annual) capacity factor of 20%, so the response here is "yes, and?"
> And more importantly, you can have _weeks_ with essentially zero solar power when you need it most.
Half the country is a mid-latitude desert. What makes you think the whole country has "weeks" with zero solar? And it does have to be the whole country in this case, because one thing a centrally planned economy can do well is joining up the infrastructure, which in this case means "actually make the power grid the USA and the EU keep wringing their hands over".
The "whole country" is irrelevant. You can't transmit arbitrary amounts of power across the large geographic areas, most of energy has to be generated in a reasonably close proximity.
> And it does have to be the whole country in this case, because one thing a centrally planned economy can do well is joining up the infrastructure
Transmission lines are expensive, regardless of your ideology.
Only technically correct because you said "arbitrary": it's well within China's manufacturing capabilities to make a grid that can transmit 3 TW over 40,000 km, with a conductor cross section so thick it only has 1 Ω resistance.
As in: all the world's current electricity demand, the long way around the planet.
I have, in fact, done the maths on this.
> Transmission lines are expensive, regardless of your ideology.
"Expensive" but not "prohibitively expensive".
All infra is "expensive". Nations have a lot of money.
And it'll turn out to cost more than building a nuke in each backyard.
> I have, in fact, done the maths on this.
No.
They can't sell as much as they would like, specifically to the USA, due to tariffs/trade war, but there's a much bigger world out there than just the US, and the overall exports are up over the last five years: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/chart-chinas-sola...
There's a Chinese-made Balkonkraftwerk sitting a few meters away from me on my patio, it cost €350, of which €50 was delivery and another €50 was the mounting posts, the remaining €250 got me 800 W of both panel and inverter.
> Unfortunately for the West every good river has already been damed so we can't follow them there.
For generation, yes. For storage, no.
You don't need a river for hydro power storage. All you need are two reservoirs with a height difference between them. Typically one of the two reservoirs is preexisting and the second is constructed. ANU identified ~1 million potential sites.
But I agree that it doesn't look like fusion is going to be cheap any time soon.
Maybe, but not necessarily. The necessary breakthrough might have been high-temperature superconducting magnets, in which case not only has it been imagined, but it has already occurred, and we're just waiting for the engineering atop that breakthrough to progress enough to demonstrate a working prototype (the magnets have been demonstrated but a complete reactor using them hasn't yet).
Or it might be that the attempts at building such a prototype don't pan out, and some other breakthrough is indeed needed. It'll probably be a couple of years until we know for sure, but at this point I don't think there's enough data to say one way or the other.
> And already, solar plus storage is cheaper than new nuclear.
It depends how much storage you mean. If you're only worried about sub-24h load-shifting (like, enough to handle a day/night cycle on a sunny day), this is certainly true. If you care about having enough to cover for extended bad weather, or worse yet, for seasonal load-shifting (banking power in the summer to cover the winter), the economics of solar plus storage remain abysmal: the additional batteries you need cost just as much as the ones you needed for daily coverage, but get cycled way less and so are much harder to pay for. If the plan is to use solar and storage for _all generation_, though, that's the number that matters. Comparing LCoE of solar plus daily storage with the LCoE of fixed-firm or on-demand generation is apples-and-oranges.
I think solar plus storage absolutely has the potential to get there, but that too will likely require fundamental breakthroughs (probably in the form of much cheaper storage: perhaps something like Form Energy's iron-air batteries).
With HTSC magnets, a tokamak much smaller than ITER could be built, but ITER is so horrifically bad that one can be much better than it and still be impractical.
> But even though radiation damage rates and heat transfer requirements are much more severe in a fusion reactor, the power density is only one-tenth as large. This is a strong indication that fusion would be substantially more expensive than fission because, to put it simply, greater effort would be required to produce less power.
https://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Tro...
We might ask why regulations are so putatively damaging to nuclear, when they aren't to civil aviation. One possibility is that aircraft are simply easier to retrofit when design flaws are found. If there's a problem with welding in a nuclear plant (for example) it's extremely difficult to repair. Witness the fiasco of Flamanville 3 in France, the EPR plant that went many times over budget.
What would this imply for fusion? Nothing good. A fusion reactor is very complex, and any design flaw in the hot part will be extremely difficult to fix, as no hands on access will be allowed after the thing has started operation, due to induced radioactivity. This includes design or manufacturing flaws that cause mere operations problems, like leaks in cooling channels, not just flaws that might present public safety risks (if any could exist.) The operator will view a smaller problem that renders their plant unusable nearly as bad as a larger problem that also threatens the public.
I was struck by a recent analysis of deterioration of the tritium breeding blanket that just went ahead and assumed there were no initial cracks in the welded structure more than a certain very small size. Guaranteeing quality of all the welds in a very large complex fusion reactor, an order of magnitude or more larger than a fission reactor of the same power output, sounds like a recipe for extreme cost.
For comparison, utility-scale solar with 16 hours of storage is 21 cents: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/higher-renewable-energy-cos...
Just raw solar without storage can be as low as 2-3 cents per kWh.
Yes, but solar power panels are also mostly produced in China, where engineers still get less than 1/3 of the US/Europe salary.
European power plants will be more expensive, but even with the LCOE of 12 (twice that of Rooppur) it's still going to be way cheaper than storage for areas that get cold weather (Midwest, Germany, most of China).
Anything south of California? Yeah, just get solar+wind, no need to bother with nuclear.
Storage is another matter here, but even there costs for batteries have simply collapsed. Understand that massive storage is needed even in a nuclear-powered economy. If all the 283 million cars and trucks in the US were replaced with 70 kWh BEVs, the storage would be enough to power the US grid (at its current average consumption) for 40 hours. That's a lot of batteries. So the demand is there to continue to drive them down their experience curves. In China, they're already around $50/kWh for installed grid storage systems (not just cell price).
The final storage problem, the only reed that nuclear can be clinging to at this point, is long term/seasonal storage. That's needed either to smooth wind variability (~ week scale) or to move solar from summer to winter (~6 months). There are at least two different ways this could be solved: hydrogen and heat. As mentioned elsewhere in these threads, the latter is very promising, with capex as little as $1/kWh of storage capacity and a RTE of about 40%. Should that work out anywhere close to that nuclear would be in a hopeless position anywhere in the world, even at very high latitudes.
Sure. Solar is easy to scale when you don't care about reliability, nobody is arguing with that. But it's another issue entirely when you need a stable grid.
I'm not aware of any countries (even tropical ones) that managed anything close to 100% renewables with solar. E.g. Hawaii has to pay for extremely expensive diesel generation even though they have plenty of solar potential.
In a fair grid, solar and wind get built out, and the residual demand has no baseload component. Unless nuclear is given the right to force other sources off the grid it becomes inappropriate.
In Texas now there is no chance of new nuclear construction. ERCOT is a competitive market and new nuclear simply doesn't make sense.
Not really? Nuclear is not any different from coal. And plenty of countries have coal generation in the mix. France also is majority-nuclear.
And so far, nuclear is the second known technology (after hydro) that actually demonstrated close to 100% fossil-free grid.
So far, there is nothing similar for solar. Even though it's supposed to be oh-so-cheap.
> In Texas now there is no chance of new nuclear construction. ERCOT is a competitive market and new nuclear simply doesn't make sense.
Well, yeah. Because they can just allow the grid to die during the next Arctic air blast.
First, coal has a much larger share of its cost as variable cost which is avoided if you don't run the plant. 40% for coal, only 10% for nuclear. This makes integrated a coal fired plant into a renewable grid easier than a nuclear plant. China is increasingly doing this with its coal plants.
Second, coal is much more forgiving of maintenance sloppiness, and even in the event of catastrophic malfunction the plant remains repairable.
Nuclear has been available in its current (and no longer competitive) state longer than solar/wind have been in their current economic state, so if you look at historical data you might conclude nuclear is better. But that's backward looking and says little about what's better in the future.
You are aware that a nuclear plant tripping offline was part of the cause of ERCOT's last winter cold problem?
Nuclear power plants have similar behavior to coal plants in another regard, they take approximately the same time to ramp up/down.
> You are aware that a nuclear plant tripping offline was part of the cause of ERCOT's last winter cold problem?
They just need to build more of them. Problem solved.
Anyway, nuclear power plants went from 0% to 70% generation in France within 20 years in 70-s. We don't see anything like this happening with solar, even in smaller island countries. Solar is successful only when it's backed by fossil fuels and government subsidies to keep that fossil fuel generation running.
The technical ability to ramp up/down is beside the point; it's the financial ability to do so that matters.
What nuclear did in France half a century ago is irrelevant. What matters is if nuclear makes sense today. It doesn't, even if it could be done.
Nuclear plants do not degrade at a constant rate, regardless of their power. By idling the plant, you extend its service life, essentially amortizing the capital cost over a longer period of time. And the capital cost is the main driver in the cost of the nuclear power, as you're pointing out yourself.
Nuclear can be made technically flexible. It can't be made economically flexible. The large fixed costs prevent the technical ability you are describing there from being useful. It's pyrrhic engineering, straining to achieve an outcome that's useless. Even France depends largely on the rest of Europe to deal with variations in demand rather than spooling their power plants up and down.
In the case of nuclear power plants, the expenses are front-loaded in the construction (and the future major maintenance, like reactor vessel annealing). The _running_ expenses are trivial by comparison. So a nuclear power plant saves a much smaller percentage of its cost on a per-month basis when it's not running.
Honestly, I looked at nuclear energy in a lot of details. It absolutely is a viable and economic path forward, but it stymied by the lack of political will. Nuclear projects take at least 8-10 years to complete, so politicians are less interested in pushing them. And commercial companies are hesitant to invest with such long repayment periods.
But there's no fundamental reason they _have_ to be one-off products. They just historically have been for at least partly regulatorily motivated reasons: because each reactor's approval process starts afresh (or rather, did until quite-recent NRC reforms), there's little advantage in reuse, and because many compliance costs are both high and fixed, there's an incentive to build fewer huge reactors rather than more small ones, which makes factory construction difficult to achieve and economies of scale hard to realize.
One doesn't need super high quality welding and concrete pours becuase of regulations as much as the basic desire to have a properly engineered solution that lasts long enough to avoid costly repairs.
Take for example this recent analysis on how to make the AP1000 competitive:
https://gain.inl.gov/content/uploads/4/2024/11/DOE-Advanced-...
There are no regulatory changes proposed because nobody has thought of a way that regulations are the cost drivers. Yet there's still a path to competitive energy costs by focusing hard on construction costs.
Similarly, reactors under completely different regimes such as the EPR are still facing exactly the same construction cost overruns as in the rest of the developed world.
If regulations are a cost driver, let's hear how to change them in a way that drives down build cost, and by how much. Let's say we get rid of ALARA and jack up acceptable radiation levels to the earliest ones established. What would that do the cost? I have a feeling not much at all, but would like to see a serious proposal.
One approach would be to reduce the size of the containment building by greatly reducing the volume of steam it must hold. This would be done by attaching Filtered Containment Venting Systems (FCVS) that strip most of the radioactive elements from the vented steam in case of a large accident.
The containment building is a significant cost driver, costing about as much as the nuclear island inside of it.
If such a system had been attached to the reactors that melted down at Fukushima exposure could have been reduced by maybe two orders of magnitude. And if the worst case exposure is that low, perhaps much more frequent meltdowns could be tolerated, allowing relaxation of paperwork requirements elsewhere.
Now, I have not checked if shorter lived radioisotopes would ruin the idea I'm suggesting. It's possible.
More seriously: what to do about the neutron flux destroying the first wall inside the reactor vessel?
I meant, needed thickness of the tritium breeding blanket.
If we started building a fusion commercial scale plant today (ie started by planning, permits, environmental assessments, public consultation, inevitable lawsuits, never mind actual construction and provisioning) it'd come online in what? 10 years? 15 years? 20 years?
Want to deploy more batteries? It can be online in months. And needs no more construction than a warehouse.
Financially fusion requires hundreds of billions, committed now, with revenue (not returns) projected at 10 years away (which will slide.) Whereas solar + storage (lots and lots of storage) requires anything from thousands to billions depending on how much you want to spend. We can start tomorrow, it'll be online in less than 2 years (probably a lot less) and since running costs are basically 0, immediate revenue means immediate returns.
Of course I'm not even allowing for fusion being "10 years" from "ready". It's been 10 years from ready for 50 years. By the time it is ready, much less the time before it comes online, it'll be redundant. And no one will be putting up the cash to build one.
And that's the problem with these Internet discussions: that's almost never the plan, but commenters trying to make solar look bad assume it is (to your credit, you made it explicit; many commenters treat it as an unspoken assumption).
In real life, solar and batteries is almost always combined with other forms of generation (and other forms of storage like pumped hydro), in large part due to being added to an already existing large-scale grid. The numbers that matter are for a combination of existing generation (thermal power plants, large-scale hydro, etc) with solar plus storage. Adding batteries for just a few hours of solar power is enough to mitigate the most negative consequences of adding solar to the mix (non-peaking thermal power plants do not like being cycled too fast, but solar has a fast reduction of generation when the sun goes down; batteries can smooth that curve by releasing power they stored during the mid-day peak).
Redwood pitched recycling. But its principal business was primary production. (Processed black mass is analogous to lithium ore.) They're struggling because demand for American-made batteries remains low.
In time there will be consolidation. This constellation of EV startup bottom-feeders will be decimated along with the 'excuses' to not make money.
I don't think the problem is that EV batteries are lasting longer, it is just that the EV market from before the Model 3 came along is miniscule. Hence not many second hand batteries to recycle.
As for EV batteries and their availability, when was the last time you saw an OG Tesla Model S with the fake grill? Those cars used to be everywhere, but where are they now? The German EVs that came out to compete, for example, Taycan and eTron, those things are not going to last the distance since the repairs cost a fortune and the parts supply is limited.
All considered, there will come a time before 2040+ when there are large quantities of these electric car batteries to upcycle, by which time the EV business will be consolidated with only a few players.
If there was money in recycling cars then every auto manufacturer would be in on it.
I find this somewhat amusing, because the black PR of the fossil-fuel industry would have us believe that EV batteries basically have a 2-year lifespan, cost lots of CO2 to produce, instantly become toxic waste after those 2 years, are non-recyclable, and overall as a result EVs emit more CO2 than gasoline-burning cars. We are being told that EVs have a larger CO2 footprint than gasoline-burners.
Then Redwood shows up with a perfect way to utilize all those discarded batteries without even opening them up, and… that toxic industrial junk isn't even there?
Also people forget how quickly EVs have grown. The Tesla Model 3 came out in 2017; that's eight years ago. That was pretty much the first mass market EV that got produced by the hundreds of thousands per year. It had eight years of battery warranty. Most EVs you see on the road were produced after 2017 and typically come with similar warranty. The simple reality is that the vast majority of EV batteries ever produced is still under it's factory warranty and nowhere near its warranty life time. The amount of gwh of battery that becomes available for companies like Redwood is fairly predictable as it is tied to the production volume 8-15 years ago.
Redwood is basically tapping into the growing number of cars that get scrapped early because of accidents or other failures. That's a smallish percentage of overall vehicles produced but at the rate EVs started getting produced around eight years ago, it's starting to add up to a few gwh of battery per year. It's not a lot yet but it's not that unpredictable. And it's not nothing. If you manufacturer new batteries at 80$/kwh, producing 1 gwh new would cost about 80M$. So giving batteries a second life has quite a bit of economic value. The issue for Redwood is probably more that competition for these batteries is quite fierce. There is a lot of valuable stuff you can do with these things and lots of companies eagerly looking to pick up second hand EVs for their batteries.
In NZ you can get 60KWh used Tesla battery for 6-10k NZD, then spend another 1-2k for additional gear + labour to hack it (overall $116-200/KWh) or 15KWh for 3.5k ($233/KWh) with warranty and safety guarantees.
Considering how expensive residential batteries are and how quickly EVs depreciate, I think soon it'll be cheaper to get a used EV as a cheap source of cells that accidentally happens to be able to drive itself around.
Imo V2G, and V2H is unnecessary and add too much complication, I think for the future, solar inverters already have the necessary hardware and certifications to be able to take power and safely connect to the grid - something that requires different hardware and standards compliance in basically every country (yes even within the EU).
I'm planning to make a 'box' that can switch between the 2 functionalities on the same cable.
The whole setup is a bit clunky as it is right, now, but I'm kinda more surprised that it works at all, and how well the fundamentals work.
This whole thing was more of an experiment in 'no way you can do this' to actually doing it, but I think this is HUGE, and will transform the way people think about electric cars.
Aren’t most people at work / school when the sun is out?
If you're not worrying about A/C then 1.5kW goes an extra long way. Outside of cooking you'll rarely exceed it.
Also, this idea that higher usage overlap with the sun being out is laughably wrong. Solar noon is between 11 AM and 2 PM. Very few people are home at that time. There is a reason that peak grid demand in almost every country is in the early evening.
Does that change anything about what I said? This is specifically about "if you do have supplementary house batteries".
> Also, this idea that higher usage overlap with the sun being out is laughably wrong.
The reason we have the duck curve is that insolation and demand largely overlap (especially when we're talking about the worst case part of the summer), but then for part of the evening they really don't overlap.
The peak use is evening, but there's a significant ramp up when the sun rises and the whole day is much higher than night. https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03062619173137... (This isn't the US but finding household graphs in particular is annoying, and most of the US has more summer heat than denmark)
Anyway evening is one of those bursts where you use the supplementary battery to handle the rest of the load. Even 10% of the car's capacity, 6kWh, could cover almost all use above 1500W.
> In much of the rest of the world, electricity demand peaks in the evening
Huh?
And again my chart showing that the entire day has much higher use than at night, then an extra high peak in evening, was Denmark.
1. Does the solar inverter do away with the need for a V2G or V2H unit?
2. What are the limitations vs a dedicated V2G/H unit?
3. Is generator input on your solar inverter a common feature across inverters?
2. Tbh not super familiar with V2G/V2H, other than it being super expensive for both the wall box and the car (only high end models tend to support it)/
3. No idea, but it's not a high end feature, I wouldn't count on any inverter to just have it, but if you're looking to buy one that does, I don't think you'll be breaking the bank.
Imo the future is for solar inverters to offer a dedicated DC car charger port, as once again all the hardware is already in there.
As long as the inverter can also provide charging this definitely has some potential.
My first 14.3 kWh pack cost about 2800$ DDP from China, delivered 03/2023. For that one I did calculate how long it took for amortization, which I projected at about 5 years.
The second, identical pack was delivered 08/2024 and cost 2000$ DDP. Since we got an EV that's drawing about 14kWh per day, I didn't bother doing the math and just ordered it.
These are 280Ah 16S 51.6V packs, based on the EVE LF280K. In an enclosure, with a BMS (Seplos, 200A) and a dedicated balancer. They are good for 6000 cycles at 140A or less [each]. Mind these were both part of small bulk orders - I think each time we ordered 6 to 8 of these, which reduced shipping costs.
If you don't work from home it makes 0 sense either.
IMO we are long way from proving V2G usefulness. Micromanaging your car SOC every night to save $2 is nuts.
I'm just pointing out this is way lower than typical pricing
[1] Three-phase wiring in homes seems to be very rare in the US, but is extremely common in Europe.
But you're right, most installers do high voltage batteries.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/distributed-energy-reso...
https://enphase.com/blog/homeowners/understanding-nem-30-and...
I believe that's more a function of auto makers (and charger cos) not trying to do much about it (and grid cos not caring), than a technical issue. The benefits (especially if V2G) are quite significant.
I doubt any car owner will say no to earning revenue from something that costs them almost nothing. The problem is more of "how do we get there at scale". (Disclaimer, I studied this topic in my thesis.)
As an example, let's say a 2 year old car is only worth 80% of an identical brand new car. The old car was bought for $50k at new, leading to a expected depreciated value of $40k. But since manufacturing has become more efficient a brand new car of the same model can be had for the same $40k. Nobody would be willing to buy the 2 year old car at the same price. You'd probably have to charge only $32k [0]. But then it looks to you as if it has depreciated 36%.
The question is how much new electric cars will fall in price in the future. And if they continue to fall, at some point the dollar value of the depreciation will be too small to care about.[1]
0: $32k = 0.8 * $40k
1: E.g. if a new car is $10k, $3600 in depreciation over two years is annoying, but not a big deal.
Yes
is it profitable? probably not.
Looking at the price for brid battery storage, and its dropping precipitously. The cost isn't as much in the batteries them selves, it packaging, placing and then controlling them.
For example if you want to have a 200Mwhr 100Mw storage site, you'll need to place it, join it to the grid, all doable. Then you need the switch gear to make it work as you want it to.
For day ahead, 30 minute trading, thats fairly simple.
For grid stabilisation, thats a bit harder, you need to be able to lead/match/lag the grid frequency by n degrees instantaneously. which is trivial at a few kw, much harder at 100Mw
Based on what numbers?
Germany alone had to pay 2 billion in dispatch measures to energy providers. And in the last 6 month we had news about a HUGE request of companies wanting to build grid stabilisation and grid market battery systems in a range of over 100GwH.
Also we do have industries which would be able to save a ton of money if the invest in smaller but similiar systems today already due to energy prices.
And in germany for example, we do have a lot of wind energy in the north but not enough live transit capacity to get it into the south. In this scenario the market would again stabilize the grid by charging at night from cheap / free wind energy production in north and transfering it to the south and then using it at day.
There's a consumer profit margin to absorb the repackaging and teardown.
Maybe for home grid batteries they'll work too. Again, a consumer margin.
Sodium Ion and other grid-specific storage will simply be too cheap for secondhand EV batteries to compete. And the retiring cells won't be any better in density and will be less safe than the higher density sodium ion and LFP that is hitting the market.
You can convert your batterie yourself into a grid support batterie for your own house to maximize your personal gain.
But you are not doing things on scale, so you need to ignore your personal labor time.
Funny issue I learned after talking to a founder at a similar company: although the battery packs were certified safe for cars (passing crash tests, wild heat differences from AK to AZ, people sitting on top of the battery packs in the car) ... the founder had issues re-certifying the batteries for safe use in a static location for grid storage.
The certification process treated his company like the batteries were made from scratch even though they used the same BMS/coolant lines/etc. already proven and tested.
It's clear you still need strong safety regulations and practices in the rare case there's an event, but the founder noted the grid storage industry regulations were adding redundant safety testing and slowing down adoption. The founder also added it's difficult to compete on cost even with effectively free used EV batteries in this startup space of grid storage against the low cost of Chinese made grid-specific batteries due to the added testing + custom hardware + space constraints and other items. (Caveat: I didn't fact check any of their statements)
The problem is that it's still really hard to get your hands on salvage Tesla batteries. Enthusiasts and hackers snatch them up quickly and the used price is not very competitive with a new EV replacement from Tesla.
only if industry and government grow some gonads and fully standardise the cells, and hardware for battery packs to allow for quick and easy dissasembly, testing, repair, and reuse, for off grid, and secondary mobile use, as industry will never trust used components for primary aplications, it is impossible to overstate how allergic industry is to this.....
second sodium is comming NOW!, and it is cheaper and safer.
But hey, why not being negative first eh? ;P
Voltfang has a few already in Germany.
The Deutsche Bahn (german train system) also does that across its own grid.
Batteries from EVs charging and discharging in stable environments are a lot saver (and they are save anyway) and do not degrade anymore.
Why would that even be green washing? Where is this coming from? Those batteries are doing exactly what they should do and saved already co2 in their first lifetime.
And what has this to do with data centers? All of these battery grid systems have veen started before the AI boom.
80% could indeed be plenty of usable life for your EV use cases, but it strongly depends on usage patterns. More degradation means more trips to the charger on a road trip. It means trips that you’d regularly make just charging at home at the end of day now require you to plug in at the destination too. It means more range anxiety as a whole.
Only if the feed in is a bottleneck. For peak shaving you could go faster.
Companies like Redwood are good at assessing the state of the battery and then managing it such that it is run optimally. Usually, it's just a few cells that are no longer working; the rest of the pack is still be fine. So that just means the max output of the pack drops a bit. But that's still more than fine for storage if all you need is a few kw of output.
Running the battery optimally also extends the useful life of the remaining cells.
They raised another $2.5M round too.
Fellten and Allye are the biggest two here in the UK I think.
Yes.
Thank you
is not a concern, double the technologie in the same space?
"In many PHEV systems, there are different modes:
Electric mode (EV mode): The vehicle runs purely on the electric motor(s) and battery until the battery depletes to some extent.
Hybrid/Parallel mode: Both the petrol engine and electric motor(s) work together to drive the wheels, especially under high load, higher speeds or when battery is low. Ithy
Series mode (in some designs): The petrol engine acts only as a generator to charge the battery or power the electric motor(s), and the wheels are driven by the electric motor(s).
For the BYD Leopard 5 (and many BYD PHEVs) the petrol engine can drive the wheels (i.e., it is not purely a generator). It is part of the drive system, especially when high power or long range is needed.
At the same time, it likely can assist with charging the battery or maintaining battery state of charge (SOC) when needed (for example, to keep the battery at some reserve level or in “save” mode). User-reports show that the petrol engine will kick in to support the electric system, charge the battery, or assist the drive under certain conditions" -
The engine in a hybrid should live an easier life compared to an ICE. No extended idle, mostly running in the power band, etc. There are lots of different ways to setup the hybrid system, but typically, rather than a small stater motor, you have a larger motor/generator that also starts the engine; it's less likely to get worn out, because it's built for continuous use.
In my PHEV, it has a 'toyota synergy' style 'e-CVT' which eliminates gear selection and should be very low maintenance (although mine had to be replaced under a service bulletin due to bearing failure because of manufacturing error) again nicer than an ICE. But some hybrids have a more traditional transmission.
Certainly, you can do ICE only or EV only, but there's a lot of room to use the ICE for things it's good for, and the EV for things it's good for, and blend where there's overlap.
I'd just say, if it starts making bearing noises (loudest around 15mph), check in and get yelly. Cause apparently they keep screwing them up. HF35 is designed and built by Ford for Ford, so they really should have everything they need to do it right. sigh
I saw a picture somewhere where they had an extra hole carved through the casing from this, worked fine until it breached and the fluid came out, then it died pretty quick.
[1] https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/tsbs/2016/SB-10092366-5448.pdf
It shouldn’t be taken as the optimal interval to maximise engine life.
Of course, modern fully synthetic engine oils are longer lasting, and I believe the newer Toyotas, at least the hybrids anyway, have electric oil pumps, and use very thin engine oil to make sure the engine is well lubricated at startup.
People do/did have frustrations with gas car mannerisms and mental approachability, like, everything was written in a mix of translated foreign language documents and borderline insane gearhead languages. That lead them to imagine that removing the gas part would drastically change the industry, in their favor.
But, in the end, gas cars are good with regular maintenance for something like 100k miles over 8 years, so, I wouldn't know what consumer product were more reliable than a gas car in the first place.
Oil and oil filter changes. Fuel filters. Air cleaners. Brake pads (that mostly goes away with hybrids too).
If I said iPads are better than laptops because there's no need to regularly replace soft drive Window and repaste NPUs every 2000 hours, everyone knows what kind of person I would be. Yet, that just casually happen all the time when it comes to EVs.
And the worst too: https://evclinic.eu/2025/09/27/if-you-drive-a-hybrid-may-god...
I don't have first-hand experience, but these guys have an EV repair shop for a while and do also hybrids, their articles always offer lots of insight.
Short run down:
- micro/mild hybrids are useless: batteries too small, engines too small to be the sole source of power, so contribution to emission reduction is very small, batteries tend to fail early because they're very small
- full hybrids have bigger batteries and engines large enough to run pure EV, but you still rely on ICE engine for everything, so there's no ability to charge at home or save on gas
- plug-in hybrids are full hybrids, but you can charge them externally; according to many studies the estimated emissions are much higher than declared, because people simply don't charge them at home and run on ICE the whole time
In all these types of hybrids the batteries are smaller than pure EVs, so they cycle faster and degrade faster. You're carrying two drivetrains all the time with added weight, one of which has plenty of maintenance items. So they're not drop-in replacements.
From what I've seen from EVClinic above, many manufacturers use custom pouch cells, not cylindrical modules like the more advanced pure EVs, so you can't repair an individual failed cell. That means full pack replacement. For many manufacturers you can't order replacement parts of the electric drivetrain, and if you do, they cost a huge chunk of the car.
So all in all if everything's well, you're good. If something goes wrong, be prepared to spend the same as you would spend for a battery replacement of a pure EV, or even more.
Hybrid is the worse of both worlds in a way. You have a combustion engine to maintain, that is useless when using electricity. You have a heavy battery useless when using your combustion engine.
You don't get all the benefits of electric, and you don't get all the benefits of ICE.
The last time there was anything rational on the table was Perry under the Trump administration's 30-day rule proposal ( https://www.nucnet.org/news/nuclear-is-vital-to-us-national-... ). It gave a hard industry incentive to any energy supplier who can have 30 days' fuel on site. This means nuclear and coal. This was no gimmick, it was the first time anyone faced reality about National Security as related to Energy for the grid and survival. And now AI datacenter yadda yadda, we're also talking about the luxury of keeping schools heated in Winter. Adverse weather even for a week is grid down game over for wind and solar. Proven natural gas are ~300 years, joy! As soon as they get around to sending pregnant whales across the ocean (losing ~20% of the gas-energy in cooling) it may even last 50 years! Before we have to go to endless war again.
Again batteries are an energy store and not an energy source. The fact the author cannot distinguish that makes the their opinion less credible.
The author is a journalist and not the expert he is interviewing thats the first thing. So why would you even evaluate the journalists 'expertise' if you get the answers from the experts.
And secondly what he probalby meant was that what if this company can 'push out' all active lifecycle before they recycle them.
This is called a metapher.
If they can't precisely convey the intended meaning in written words, they shouldn't be a journalist.
You just might not be one of them.
And no no one needs to write everything so that everyone always gets it.
I for example do not write blog articles for kids. I also don't write very technical blog articles for people outside of tech.
That's a bullshit justification. "It's factually wrong, but that's okay, the true audience knows what the author means anyway." Then why write it at all? It makes no sense. Stop making up excuses for clueless journalists.
'Discussing' this with you is really a downer.