Inventions for battery reuse and recycling increase seven-fold in last decade | Hacker News Reader

Inventions for battery reuse and recycling increase seven-fold in last decade

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245 pointsJeanKage40 comments

I recently read an article about a company that develops technology for re-using worn-out EV batteries for grid storage. After all, your EV battery with 70% capacity would be useful for many years somewhere in the desert with thousands of other similar batteries, as large-scale grid storage. The technology was great, the business model was sound, grid operators were very interested, everything was fine, except… the supply of those EV batteries.

Turns out those EV batteries do not degrade as quickly as we were repeatedly told (by black PR, my guess) and there simply aren't enough to go around :-)

EDIT: I can't find the original article, but I found this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/08/01/electric...

I had a friend working on tech to recycle ev car batteries for household storage. One of the issues has been that the durability of these batteries is much better than people thought

The myths are insane, you will see them on here all the time.

Evs are so heavy, wear through tires, good luck when you need to replace the battery. The resources to build it are bad for the environment.

It’s exhausting. It’s like those folks that complain about tax rates for the top brackets and they are making 60k.

>It’s like those folks that complain about tax rates for the top brackets and they are making 60k.

You don't need to be rich to have economic literacy.

Yea but going back to the comparison to EV discussions. That’s not how this plays out. People have no thought and just latch on to ideas people feed them. There is no depth beyond the one statement.

"The resources to build it are bad for the environment."

Have you recently checked on how oil is produced?

And batteries from abundant materials are avaiable, lithium is just still cheap. But yes, exhausting.

You missed that I was listing off myths.

Indeed.

The issue is that battery packs tend to fail abruptly, one cell in one module goes bad completely.

So the worn out packs almost all have bad cells as well.

Its expensive to repair them because of how much dangerous manual labor is involved.

New batteries have gotten so cheap it likely makes reuse of used batteries uneconomic.

Average costs of a new utility scale system are around $125/kWh of which $75/kWh is equipment of which $40/kWh is the LFP cells.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...

Existing batteries used in cars usually have more expensive NMC chemistries. Their nickel and cadmium are worth about $30/kWh alone. They’re possibly worth more recycled for their constituent metals than reused for grid storage.

Redwood Materials is a major battery recycling company, probably the one mentioned.[1] They have a few moderate sized facilities using old EV batteries for grid storage, but their main business is extracting lithium from old batteries. They have a Battery Bin, placed at retail locations, where people can deposit old batteries, phones, and laptops. It has a fire suppression system.

Like steel, this industry will probably settle down to where most of the materials are recycled. Over half of steel in the US is recycled, and Nucor, which is a steel recycler, is the US's biggest steel producer. Much of what's not recycled is lost as rebar inside concrete.

[1] https://www.redwoodmaterials.com

It's well-understood in the Tesla owner's community that the battery is going to outlast the rest of the car. I think a lot of the "batteries go bad" beliefs started when hybrids first came out, and then it just got stuck in the public doxa.

This is the greatest fear. Take the example of simple AA batteries. As time and technology progressed, we didn't get safer, easily reusable and rechargable batteries and infra to charge them and safely dispose when they eventually met its end life.

Instead we (India) got dirt cheap throwaway batteries everywhere that came bundled with every item or toy we buy...

I think economics and incentives are in such a way that global ICE conversion to EV will happen a lot faster than technologies that can cheaply recycle them or dispose them is available..We worry about pollution of atmosphere, and I am wondering what similar thing could happen when the improperly disposed EV batteries starts piling up. At least for atmosphere, plants and trees could potentially cleanup CO2..What will clean up those dead batteries and the potentially toxics chemicals that seep out of them, if the economics and incentives are not aligned to make that happen? I don't think regulations are powerful enough to do that (at least until it is too late)...then what else?

Will the developed countries just ship their crap to places like my country and call it a day? I mean, if we buy some food from some hotel, it already come in some recycled container from china or something..and unless I am mistaken our toys are mostly made of plastic waste from china..

Would something similar happen with EV waste as well?

EV batteries last much longer than we were told:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2022/08/01/electric...

and, after they are no longer useful in EVs, they are still useful for at least another decade as grid storage.

There was (and still is) a lot of black PR around this, sponsored by the fossil fuel industry.

Climate change due to CO2 is going to be far more catastrophic.

So India should just keep acting as the waste dump for Europe, US and China because the alternative would be even worse?

No, India should ban nonrechargeable batteries - import and sale. Why is it other countries' fault what India chooses to bring into and sell in India?

India should stop being India.

It would be unfair of me to speculate why but India is one of the few countries I know of that does not truly advance the population as it grows.

Most CO2 in the air stays there for geological time frames. Local pollution from badly managed landfills is unlikely to collapse global ecosystems.

CO2 is much more serious

It's a little odd to think that 100 kWh battery packs would have the lifecycle as integrated .01 kWh components. The value prop for recycling is, obviously, incomparable.

> The value prop for recycling is, obviously, incomparable..

It might be. But I think the more important thing is where the value goes. If it goes to the environment, the businesses have zero incentives to address it own their own. At least until the problems becomes a lot obvious and too late until proper regulations are formed.

This is because of expiring patents which create an artificial inflation of businesses' durable market value for the incumbent allowing them to monopolize the market via supply scarcity. Naturally there would have been more recycling the entire time if it were not restricted by patents.

Or, less conspiratorially, it's because the volume of batteries that need recycling has been steadily growing.

Both can be true.

Or because the possibility of profits incentivized invention.

All three of these theories can be true

In which case the market is working as intended.

Is someone saying otherwise here?

YahooTube’s comment is heavily implying that the market systems in-place stifled invention via patent restrictions.

Yes, but isn’t that working as intended?

As we can see by this thread… It’s heavily debated as to whether the intentions we should be following are those of long-dead forbears, or the will of the people, and in the latter, which people.

If all three are true then the market is 2/3 working as intended and 1/3 held back by patents that aren't being licensed out enough.

Alternatively, if all three are true, 1/3 are held back because of the lack of incentive to develop an invention.

Which patents were the biggest hold backs in the recycling industry? I am curious how the patent landscape looks today compared to a decade ago. Seems like it would be exploding in more recent history.

Sorry what?

This type of content would never cross my path normally , way outside my skillset. But it is stil interesting and exactly why I keep coming back to HN.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the founder.

We're designing a cool repairable (and fireproof!) connected ebike battery at https://infinite-battery.com

If you're an e-bike geek, let's talk!

How do you deal with voltage balance when replacing one bad cell out of a whole battery? My understanding is that lithium ion battery cells need to be close to each other in voltage or else they suddenly rebalance when reconnected, and can burst into flames.

> How do you deal with voltage balance when replacing one bad cell out of a whole battery?

Their BMS handles this. Read their reviews a minor complaint is that it takes 24-36hr to fully rebalance all the cells.

Hey! Thanks for your question :)

If you have just a slight imbalance it's taken care of by the BMS, as it continuously monitor and rebalances cells. That said, if you had used the battery for a while, and you need to change just one cell, you can't put a brand new one, it must be matched.

That's why we would recommend changing all cells. But the good thing is that changing all the cells in the battery will cost you perhaps $50 with our repairable battery. Compare that with $250-$500 with "classical models" where you need to buy a brand new battery

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