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.
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.
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.
Exactly, it goes from being about the capacity:weight ratio to capacity:cost and as a bonus also postpones having to use powernto recycle them (and hopefully it’ll be cheaper/more efficient to do so then).
In practice they’re used more as a sort of capacitor to provide voltage regulation on the grid, basically what gas is doing for reliability. Not sure how often that wouldn’t involve a full discharge, but I know most gas in this context is running way below its capability.
It sounds like this is being used for day/night storage here as opposed to spot demand, so it may be using more of the charge range.
I wonder if these batteries have reduced peak power output, can they fulfil the kind of balancing that you are suggesting? I guess if they had enough it would be fine.
I just assume so because of their application in EVs but might also depend what kv level lines they’re stepped up for.