B2U
Last week, a company called B2U Storage Solutions announced the start of operations at a 25 megawatt hour battery facility in California. California adds a lot of battery power, so that’s not much of a news per se. But in this case, the source of the battery was unusual. Many of the batteries previously powered electric vehicles.
The idea of reusing electric vehicle batteries has been around for some time. Battery capacity and discharge rate must meet certain standards in order to function in a vehicle, but their performance degrades with use. However, even after the battery no longer meets the needs of the vehicle, it can still store enough energy for use on the power grid. This suggests that grid storage may be an intermediate destination between vehicles and recycling.
However, there are some significant technical and economic challenges to realizing this idea. So he spoke to Freeman Hall, the CEO of B2U, to find out why the company has decided it’s the right time to bring this concept to life.
supply and demand
The idea may have been around for a while, but implementing it required two things. A steady supply of used car batteries and a regular excess supply of cheap electricity to recharge the batteries. Hall says his company began by installing solar projects in California, and began to see what’s called a “duck curve,” when solar power begins to over-generate in the mid-afternoon. ‘s growth also began to ensure a steady supply of high-quality batteries to store electricity. “But there has been a steady stream of these batteries becoming available.”
Batteries can often hold a significant amount of charge, even after heavy use in the car. Also, by working with his battery OEM, B2U is now able to utilize a number of batteries that were not previously used in cars. “They had some powertrain warranty dynamics to replace batteries that didn’t meet certain promised specifications, and some early vehicles like the Leaf had some pack replacement programs. “There are R&D batteries out there, they are used in R&D and then made available. It can also be used as a stationary storage.”
As a result, there is a growing collection of batteries that can retain around 65-85% of their original capacity, but no longer offer the performance expected for automotive use. Although performance continues to degrade over time, grid-level energy storage does not require rapid charge or discharge operations that put the most strain on battery capacity. As such, the company hopes to get a good deal of use out of them before they are sent for recycling.”These batteries work very well,” Hall told his Ars. . “They are designed for very demanding use cases, and less demanding use cases with persistent storage.”
