ON A BARREN field in Lancaster, California, where the temperature often tops 100 degrees in summer, sit eight white boxes that might be a key to a greener future. Each 10 x 22-foot rectangle holds 20 battery packs that once powered Nissan Leafs. But they’ve lost some of their juice. Inside a car, they can no longer power speedy accelerations, and their 85-mile ranges have been reduced to about 55 miles.Out of Power
But the batteries still work. Research suggests they may retain two-thirds or more of their original capacity. So for the past 18 months, these batteries have been living a second act: storing energy from nearby rows of solar panels. Their owner, B2U Storage Solutions, wants to know how effectively, and for how long, they can do that.
B2U sprung up in 2019 to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist yet. Automakers, spurred in some cases by government mandates, are frantically converting their fleets to run on electricity, rather than petroleum. By 2030, the International Energy Agency estimates that between 145 million and 230 million electric vehicles will be on the road, saving 120 metric tons of carbon emissions annually. But the batteries inside those vehicles will be heavy, expensive, toxic, and sometimes fire-prone. What will happen to them when they can no longer power a car? How to keep them from hurting people, or the environment?
Some researchers and entrepreneurs are working hard on ways to recycle the materials inside batteries. They hope batteries will become part of what’s called a “circular economy”—that energy and value will be wrung out of every natural resource and material.
Others say, yes, let’s do that. But we should also look at reusing batteries that have already been built. Recycling a battery, after all, takes energy, and releases emissions of its own. The heavy battery pack has to travel somewhere and be taken apart and then ground down, via water or chemical processes, to its raw materials. Those materials then travel somewhere else—often overseas—to be remade into something new. “Making a battery back from recycled material is more energy-intensive than just using a battery that is already out there,” says Ahmad Pesaran, chief energy storage engineer for a National Renewable Energy Laboratory center that focuses on transportation. Instead, why not do something useful with that old battery?