This Southern California solar farm is using retired EV batteries for storing the power and then send to the grid when needed. This way the retired batteries can extend their usefulness for several…::A Southern California company is showing how repurposing EV batteries for stationary storage can extend their usefulness for several years.
That’s actually an ingenious idea I hadn’t thought about. How much cheaper are these batteries once they’ve been retired? Would this be a viable option for someone running solar at home, and wanting to store the power for later use, or is a home battery still the better option?
Yea, with a car you can’t really use them once the range gets low enough
With this, a bunch of batteries can work together for much longer. You also don’t need to worry about weight since they’re in one place
A Tesla Model 3, for example, has a battery capacity of 50 to 82 kWh. Let’s assume the lowest capacity of 50 kWh. A car battery is basically unusable long before it has lost around half its capacity. So 25 kWh. American households on average consume 10.6 MWh annually or about 29 kWh per day.
So an old Tesla battery still provides enough electricity to power an American household for nearly an entire day.
Really puts into perspective what a monumental waste of energy individual traffic, also with electric cars, is as well.
There’s also something about their peak current being reduced with age, and in this use case, they don’t really need that peak current, so they really can stay useful for a long time in this use case
I thought I read that this was a plan Tesla had to repurpose the car batteries into power walls for home consumers. Not sure that ever ended up happening but great to see the retired car batteries given a second life
A 50 KWh or more battery pack will be overkill for most homes. But those will likely be available for cheap soon so it might still be a good option. Putting a pack that weighs several hundred kilos in your basement might be difficult, though.
What an atrociously dangerous planned design.
- Poor design: Thermal runaway is a serious problem that this setup has a very high chance of occurring. When it occurs, not if, it will spread fast from one container to the next and it will not be able to be put out that is the current fire fighting procedure for the state.
- It is very dangerous because these old batteries produce a very toxic and dangerous compounds when in thermal runaway. Again firefighting procedures cover hazmat requirements and it’s well documented the dangerous compounds that are present especially in these older batteries.
Net result. It will create another unstoppable fire that will dump poisons into ground water and the air recklessly endangering anyone down wind.
Solutions not problems:
- Isolate each container in an empty dam that is able to be filled with super chilled salt water the moment a runaway begins.
- Design fire suppression and shutdown to protect residents and the grid. Keep personal onsite to monitor with the authority to immediately react to fire incidents.
Do you think the engineers haven’t thought about that?
Do you think personal safety, firefighting ability, and effects on the environment has informed the design of like… anything in the last 50 years?
“Faster to catch fire, faster to spread, faster to catastrophically fail, more dangerous to life and health, and worse for the environment when it does so” describes anything from modern house construction to vehicle manufacturing.
Priority one is “cheaper”, the rest is just noise.
They actually have not thought of that no. In fact there is a cult like level of ignorance that has already just caused a serious fire & toxic release with this exact same hair brain layout and design. That said the method of fire containment is very new out of the Netherlands I believe.
After hearing jokes about college professors evacuating planes when they hear that their students designed them? Wouldn’t put it past em. Even experts make big mistakes.
I’m assuming that doing full charge/discharge cycles on them daily will put more wear on them than every day driving would?
But if your buying them at scrap value and the. Still selling them as scrap after a few more years I guess it works out.
The way lithium batteries work, they wear out less if you only discharge and charge them slightly. So a battery that is charged to 60%, discharged to 40%, and repeated like that will keep most of its capacity even after years of prolonged use. On the other hand, charging a battery quickly, until it is full, or discharging it until it is nearly empty will reduce its capacity over time.
A Tesla Model 3 has a battery capacity of at least 50 kWh. Even if it has lost half of its capacity, the 20% capacity difference between 60% and 40% charge, or more realistically, the 50% difference between 75% and 25%, still represents 12.5 kWh of capacity. Suppose you had an array of 1,000 such batteries. That would represent 12.5 MWh of storage capacity, enough to power ten thousand homes (at 1.2 kW each) for an hour. Certainly nothing to sneeze at.
Being packed away in a static location has much lower energy density requirements than driving around with the battery on-board. Getting the most out of them and then reprocessing the materials seems better than just reprocessing right away once they’re no longer useful for EVs.
Good idea but good luck to the people who will try to take the fire out
Edit: I’m not saying that it’s bad, of course renewable, solar, electric is good. But knowing how horrible electric vehicle fires are to put out, I don’t see a fire of piled up batteries being an easy challenge for firefighters
Any energy storage device has risks. In this case the risk is higher, but so is the overall energy storage capability. If you store them off to the side in their own little building, there’s no real risk beyond loss of investment and environmental impacts.
Not to mention, firefighters now have tools to fight these types of fires.
Also since it’s in one place, you can build in detection and fire suppression measures.
Could be as simple as having the tools nearby (fire hydrant style), or as complex as automating the checks and suppression (cut off power, isolate the problem cells, spray em)
Batteries and by extension EVs have a much lower risk of catching fire than ICE cars. Stop repeating fossil fuel industry gaslighting.
Bring on electric grid storage but don’t delude yourself it’s all sunshine and rainbows. The dangers of lithium nickel cobalt fires and toxic chemical release is very serious with a weird cult like level of ignorance. The actual grid battery fires and subsequent poisioning that’s occurred recently without consideration for the downwind population and groundwater are raising some big red flags.
Current state procedure for putting out lithium nickel cobalt fires. Hazmat gear and let it burn out.
For real.
