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Ahead-looking: Rising demand for AI-driven knowledge facilities is straining the power grid. Repurposed electrical automobile batteries provide a promising answer, storing renewable power extra effectively whereas decreasing waste. This rising know-how may reshape how we energy the digital age.
Redwood Vitality, a Redwood Supplies enterprise, goals to change how folks use lithium-ion batteries. As an alternative of sending batteries from electrical automobiles straight to recycling, the corporate provides them a second life, extending their use earlier than reclaiming minerals like lithium, cobalt, and nickel. The corporate’s engineers and technicians discovered that many batteries nonetheless maintain over half their authentic capability after they’re not appropriate for vehicles. As an alternative of breaking them down instantly, the staff repurposes these batteries as stationary power storage items.
Redwood runs a nationwide logistics community that collects over 70 % of North America’s used battery packs annually. Technicians conduct superior diagnostics to find out whether or not to reuse a battery or recycle it. Those who go are assembled into modular power storage methods, no matter producer or chemistry. Redwood’s management system allows these various packs to work collectively, storing and delivering electrical energy on demand.
Repurposed battery methods are a pure match for contemporary knowledge facilities, that are increasing quickly with the rise of AI and cloud computing. These amenities eat large quantities of energy, and analysts forecast a big surge in demand. By 2028, knowledge facilities may use as much as 12 % of all electrical energy generated within the US. Conventional grid enlargement and battery manufacturing cannot sustain, and whereas wind and photo voltaic are clear, they’re intermittent. Massive-scale battery storage helps fill the hole by storing extra power when it is out there and releasing it when it isn’t.
A brand new microgrid constructed close to Reno, Nevada, with AI infrastructure firm Crusoe, exhibits this method in motion. The set up delivers 12 megawatts of energy and 63 megawatt-hours of storage, making it the most important second-life battery deployment on this planet – and the most important microgrid in North America. Tons of of repurposed EV batteries, paired with photo voltaic panels, now energy a knowledge middle operating 2,000 GPUs. Your entire undertaking got here collectively in simply 4 months, far quicker than the years it typically takes to safe new grid connections or construct an influence plant.
It really works nicely as a result of stationary storage places much less pressure on batteries than powering a transferring automobile. Electrical automobile batteries should deal with speedy acceleration and fixed biking, however microgrids function at slower discharge charges and decrease frequencies. In consequence, batteries not fitted to vehicles can nonetheless carry out reliably on this position – typically at half the price of new lithium-ion methods, with comparable efficiency.
Redwood’s method closes the battery lifecycle loop: after repurposing batteries in microgrids, the corporate ultimately recycles them to get better vital minerals and feed the provision chain. This mannequin has broad potential. With over 5 million electrical automobiles on US roads and greater than 100,000 retiring annually, the pool of reusable batteries is rising quick. Redwood estimates that these second-life batteries may ultimately provide half or extra of your entire power storage market.
JB Straubel, founding father of Redwood Supplies and co-founder of Tesla, calls this only the start. He informed Bloomberg the corporate already has sufficient reusable batteries to energy microgrids supplying over 1,000,000 houses for an hour, with plans for initiatives ten instances bigger than its present deployment.
