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As car manufacturers continue to battle in the electric car race, some have begun to wonder, where will batteries go once they reach the end of their automotive useful lives? Simply disposing of the battery in some sort of landfill isn’t going to help the environment and it certainly isn’t going to please car makers or customers. To address this concern, many of the big car manufacturers in the electric car race have teamed up with electricity and energy-savvy companies to plan ways to recycle and reuse old electric car batteries and their energy. Have done
General Motors has announced that it will collaborate with Swiss company ABB, a leader in power and automation technologies and the world’s largest supplier of power grid systems, to design a plan to reuse batteries from the Chevrolet Volt. The companies will develop several pilot projects and test the Volt’s 16-kWh lithium-ion battery to see how second-life car batteries can be used to provide an electric grid storage system. During the pilot projects, the companies will study renewable energy storage, grid load management, back-up power supply for communities and time of use management.
According to Mickey Bailey, GM executive director of electrical systems, ‘the Volt’s battery will have significant capacity to store electrical energy well beyond its automotive life.’ This means that even after the eight-year or 100,000-mile warranty offered on the Volt, there will still be energy in the battery that can be used for other purposes if the car’s battery is recycled. Thus, GM’s ultimate goal through the ABB partnership is to find a cost-effective solution that will optimize the full life cycle of the battery and improve the efficiency of the nation’s electrical grid.
Another car manufacturer that has begun to study the possibilities of recycling electric batteries is Nissan. Nissan has entered into a joint venture with Sumitomo Corporation to conduct research on lithium-ion batteries. The joint venture, called 4R Energy, aims to ‘reuse, resell, remanufacture and recycle’ the electric batteries that power the Nissan Leaf.
The company is expected to conduct demonstration tests and commercialization studies as it works towards developing a business for second-life uses of lithium-ion batteries.
Finally, California electric car maker Tesla Motors has entered into a research project with SolarCity, a national leader in solar design and installation, and the University of California, Berkeley, to investigate older electric car battery possibilities. The trio is developing a system that combines Tesla’s electric car battery system with SolarCity’s monitoring platform to produce an advanced grid-interactive photovoltaic (PV) and stationary storage product that will be able to be installed in buildings . The idea is that the battery storage created will collect excess PV power that the utility can use instead of using large emitting power plants.
So, as the electric car race heats up, it seems likely that General Motors, Nissan, and Tesla Motors will all be competing in the electric car battery race as well. With big ideas like storage for renewable energy, smart grids, and providing back-up power for buildings, who knows where the electric car battery’s second life will end up.
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