Redwood Materials, a company founded by a former Tesla CTO, has found a new use for used electric car batteries. Instead of the usual recycling, Redwood creates modular energy storage systems from them that cost much less than new solutions and help relieve the load on the power grid. This is reported by The Verge.
The main goal of the project is to store and reuse batteries that are no longer suitable for powering electric vehicles, but still have up to 50% of their remaining capacity. And there are a lot of them: every year Redwood receives more than 20 GWh of batteries - the equivalent of 250,000 cars. The company predicts that this year alone , more than 100,000 electric cars will be retired, which means that the resource will grow.
Instead of completely recycling the batteries, engineers first test them for suitability. If they work, they are integrated into flexible modular storage systems that can be used autonomously or connected to the grid. Redwood already has more than 1 GWh of batteries ready for reuse, and plans to increase this to 6 GWh per year.
The company has already launched its first microgrid in Nevada, powered by reconditioned batteries. It has a capacity of 12 MW and a capacity of 63 MWh. It powers the Crusoe modular data center with 2,000 GPUs and an artificial intelligence infrastructure. Redwood calls the facility the world’s largest battery second-life project — enough energy to power 9,000 homes or charge a car to the moon.
In addition, the company recycles batteries for Tesla, Ford, Amazon, Lyft, Toyota, Specialized and others, as well as produces anodes and cathodes at a plant in South Carolina.