This is the big snag with EVs (as with solar panels and wind turbines): how much does a battery really cost if you factor in recycling and environmental damages? (Sorry about the slideshow format.)
I know someone who wanted to make a recycling startup for the batteries (pick the cells that are still ok and assemble new batteries out of them), but there’s so much red tape in my country for that (needs to request a recycling permission with a lot of requirements) that he just gave up.
i want to see them transferred to fixed energy storage (ie, home power walls). they are no longer fit for a car, and the huge power draw required, but when you move that to a home, the capacity and power draw is miniscule.
i would love to see a company put that together, and have something like a rack mount, which will take in various batteries and gets them to be “hot swappable”
reuse, beforerecyclei’ve seen some ex-nissan leaf battery packs get turned into DIY solar power storage for home use (on youtube), but it looks super complicated & not really doable for most people.
full on recycling, breaking down to chemicals/metals and then reselling back to battery manufacturing companies is far more realistic for most EV batteries. it can be a dirty process though.
undefined> i’ve seen some ex-nissan leaf battery packs get turned into DIY solar power storage for home use (on youtube), but it looks super complicated & not really doable for most people.
You’ll be happy to know old Nissan Leaf batteries are being used at utility scale for excess solar power storage.
Correct about the reduce and reuse before recycling.
But there is one thing to consider: does recharging efficiency also go down with battery lifecycles? Because that is the main factor in determining whether you should reuse it or not.
I had this impression that the stress-destress microscopic flaws that cause reductions to battery capacity also produce waste heat (and from real life dealing with old phone batteries that take forever and heat up when recharging), which you don’t want or at least need to calculate a break-even point when recharging efficiency is low enough to send to recycle.
good question.
I think that you will find that vehicle batteries become unsuitable for locomotion far quicker than a phone battery becomes unsuitable for a phone. But i dont have any real proof.
I will note, that there are a bunch of written-off cars that have their batteries on the second hand market, that is another avenue for re-using batteries.
