[HN Gopher] Used EV Batteries Could Power Tomorrow's Solar Farms
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Used EV Batteries Could Power Tomorrow's Solar Farms
Author : headalgorithm
Score : 108 points
Date : 2020-06-10 16:09 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| How recyclable are these newer battery chemistries? I know that
| lead acid batteries are fairly easy to recycle, but many of these
| more exotic ones seem harder to recycle.
| TD-Linux wrote:
| It is more complicated because there are more compounds to
| recover, and the batteries have a finer structure, but you can
| still do a broadly similar process.
|
| Compare lead-acid recycling:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxCFDWMPu38
|
| To lithium recycling:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxCFDWMPu38
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I'm not sure how realistic this is on a commercial scale. There
| are a bunch of people doing this for their own solar offgrid
| projects, maybe even a few doing it as a cottage industry.
| However, I can't really see striping, testing and reconfiguring
| lithium batteries being a big part of future solar farms.
| jotm wrote:
| Why not? Refurbishing of household appliances and electronics
| is a big industry, for example.
| brianwawok wrote:
| In a few years will be hundreds of thousands of Tesla EV
| batteries getting to the point they want replaced. If we can
| find a use for them it's pretty awesome.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| Tesla has been talking about this for years and I've already
| read about old ev batteries used for this purpose. So its a
| good idea.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think the problem is mostly logistics. To get good use
| out of an old array, you have to QA all of the cells and
| discard the worst ones, because when you wire batteries in
| sequence (to get higher voltage), then the weakest link
| effect is very prominent. And if memory serves, to get the
| most out of a battery array you want to 'match' the cells,
| so you have to bin the used batteries the same way Intel
| bins CPUs.
|
| If memory serves, you have to charge a battery to measure
| this, which takes time and therefore space.
|
| So to get the cost to be cheaper than just building a new
| pack (possibly using binned new packs), this all has to be
| pretty automated. If they bin new cells (if they don't
| maybe they should!), then most of this hardware would
| already exist. Which would mean you only need to talk about
| how to make a robot to desolder battery packs. Given how
| crap my soldering skills are this feels like a potentially
| hard or at least expensive problem.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I saw a film about battery recycling recently and the
| first thing they have to do with incoming cells is
| discharge them. They were using the energy to power the
| site. Clearly it wouldn't be much more work to cycle the
| batteries.
| hinkley wrote:
| I recall something like that too, but they worked it a
| bit like a counter-flow heat exchanger - drain one batch
| of cells to charge another.
| ecpottinger wrote:
| You don't have to do that to a Tesla battery. The
| individual cells when they go bad disconnect themselves
| using a fuse wire. All you have to do is test the pack to
| see how much power it can store.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Tesla's previous CTO, JB Straubel, left to found Redwood
| Materials. He intends to commercialize recycling of
| batteries at scale, and the rumor is Tesla will be a
| customer of the output from Redwood for battery
| manufacturing.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/06/tesla-cto-jb-straubel-
| redwoo...
| brianwawok wrote:
| Would be sweet. Could bring new life (and new range) into
| a 10 year old car to swap in the battery.
| [deleted]
| Havoc wrote:
| Perhaps if the facility is designed with a lot of fault
| tolerance from the start? Some places aren't short on space so
| should be fine if you can separate things enough to mitigate
| fire risk?
| mikestew wrote:
| Back when Nissan was doing their dog-and-pony show ("come take
| a test drive!" in a very controlled environment) for the Leaf
| (2009), that was their exact spiel for what would be done with
| the batteries when they were past their prime. Now that the
| early Leafs are at the point of needing new batteries, I'm
| curious if Nissan is following through (but not curious enough
| to go looking.)
| ragebol wrote:
| Well there you go: https://www.johancruijffarena.nl/default-
| showon-page/amsterd... (from comment by louwrentius)
| mikestew wrote:
| Thanks for the link (you, too, _louwrentius_ ), I think I
| might have grown just a little less cynical today.
| ip26 wrote:
| The farm itself probably wouldn't be doing it, but buying from
| someone who does.
|
| I find myself thinking of lead acid battery recycling:
| https://www.energy-storage.news/news/lead-acid-batteries-are...
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| There's no shortage of uses for 'used' ev batteries that
| outlasted the vehicles they were in. They are quite a valuable
| commodity already. There's all sorts of things you can do with a
| good quality battery that is still good for a few tens of kwh of
| storage.
|
| But even when they are still in the car they can be off use to
| the grid and provide many GW of on demand buffers for both energy
| shortages and over supply.
|
| There recently have been negative energy rates where electricity
| producers preferred to not shut down expensive to restart plants
| and instead ended up incentivizing people to charge their car
| batteries.
|
| This doesn't even have to be a huge amount of energy per car.
| Even a single kwh of capacity per day would quickly add up if
| there's millions of vehicles plugged into the grid.
|
| The same technology can allow the same users to power their house
| for several days using just a single car and allow them to
| leverage their own solar panels, get payed to soak up excess grid
| energy (e.g. at night when wind mills continue producing), deal
| with grid outages, resell their own solar excess when demand is
| high, etc.
|
| With million mile batteries, people'll be less concerned about
| breaking their batteries; especially if they get to spend less on
| electricity. With leased battery business models, this could be
| simply part of the deal.
| martinald wrote:
| This is becoming more and more common in the UK:
| https://www.energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile-london/ (these are
| retail prices anyone in the UK with a smart meter can take
| advantage of).
|
| Basically high wind production with sunlight results in
| negative pricing. The difference between the 4-8pm "peak" is
| very high between the rest of the day too.
|
| There is an enormous business opportunity here. Prices are
| going from -3p/kWh to 25p in the same 24 hours nearly weekly.
| kd913 wrote:
| I wish there were home appliances that could take advantage
| of this excess supply of electricity. Since 2003 I have been
| hearing about the concept of the smart grid and yet nothing
| seems to have particularly materialized.
|
| It's 2020, I wish there was a way for me to somehow schedule
| my washing machines and dishwasher to run easily other the
| internet at times of negative energy. Heck why isn't this
| possibility grid controlled yet? Having a large surplus of
| consumer appliances controlled by the grid could be a greener
| easier solution than relying on batteries.
|
| Alas, I still can't even control my washing machine over the
| internet. If I could, the appliance is expensive and using
| proprietary 'dumb' apps.
| mkchoi212 wrote:
| This is something I'm super excited about. People should note
| that people started trying this out long time ago with batteries
| from used laptops. I believe couple people were even able to
| create DIY household energy storage solutions with just old
| battery laptops!
|
| Once the industry figures out the problem of scaling, this could
| be very impactful.
| zoren wrote:
| I thought solar farms produced power.
| djsumdog wrote:
| Solar farms still require traditional gas, coal or nuclear
| plants to provide idle power. Except for certain regions, you
| can't have consistent solar, and you need to have backup power
| for brownouts.
|
| The idea with better batteries is that solar stations could
| provide their own excess capacity storage.
|
| But battery tech is still not good enough for large scale
| storage. The break down chemically and are not easy to
| refurbish. The only real "battery" that sorta works is the
| Racoon Mountain hydro station, which uses extra electricity to
| pump water into a resistor and then drains it for power during
| high peaks.
|
| We should be building these all over the country, but they
| don't really provide that much capacity; plus you kinda destroy
| the environment around an entire hill and have to build it back
| up afterwards (Racoon Mtn does have really good mountain biking
| trails now).
|
| But this is just more fluff to green wash technology that
| really cannot ever truly replace hydrocarbons. We really need
| to minimize and reduce energy consumption. That's probably
| never going to happen.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| High voltage inter-connectors will help with this. If we wire
| up the world we won't need much backup power at all.
| ben_w wrote:
| They do. But as some people keep complaining, not at night.
| This can shift the output of a solar farm to when it's dark.
|
| It might not be literal truth, but it's close enough to be
| understood -- like saying "this food comes from a supermarket"
| even though the food actually comes from five different farms
| in different countries.
| dwighttk wrote:
| I was sort of hoping the solar farms would produce power...
| mrgzg1 wrote:
| Having used one of these used LifePo4 batteries for my van build,
| https://www.techdirectclub.com/lifepo4-lfp-battery-24-volts-...
| I'm pretty impressed how much bang for buck I can get compared to
| traditional lead acid batteries. In future build's I'll resort to
| just using singular Nissan Leaf battery cells, give more
| configurability + easy to replace just a dysfunctional cell.
|
| I see a lot of useful tools on van and boat sites, around
| managing non traditional batteries and interfacing them with
| solar panels + engine alternators. Off to a cleaner and decoupled
| from grid future! Micro grids everywhere.
| agumonkey wrote:
| May I see your van ?
| dylan604 wrote:
| There's so many different directions for jokes on this
| comment, but yes, I too would be interested in seeing the
| mods.
| mrgzg1 wrote:
| I'll dig up a photo of the battery / electronics and post it
| here soon. To give you an overview of it: - 300W of flexible
| solar panels (~$90/pop, tend to get about 1.5kWh on great
| sunny days, enough to power my fan + fridge without having to
| run the van) - Victron MPPT charge controller (pretty
| impressed by their quality, and their app that talks to the
| controller over bluetooth, nothing comes close to them in
| simplicity of setup) - Victron battery to battery charger
| without ground isolation (gets triggered by engine hot
| signal, so I don't drain the van battery) - 2000W cheap
| inverter for running instantpot / magicbullet. I prefer to
| have DC appliances, but hard to find DC pressure cooker /
| mixers - couple of 12v regulators for 12vdc devices - ofc the
| BYD Lifepo battery, I haven't deep cycled this a ton, but my
| suspicion is that it's around 3.5kWH usable capacity.
|
| I plan to add a cheap 360 camera system from aliexpress and
| run it off the aux battery mainly for security monitoring
| around the vehicle, the standard backup cams on any 2017+
| vans are decent. If I get to it, it'd be interesting to get a
| Pi in there with OBD breakout to read in car data / gimmick.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Just took a look at the battery listing you provided. I have
| not seen someone use an actual tape measure showing the HxWxD
| of the product rather than just listing them. I think I prefer
| it.
| giarc wrote:
| I'd rather see the listing. Is the height 9", 10", 11"? Hard
| to tell because of the angle.
| mrgzg1 wrote:
| Agreed that having it listed is better, they do have exact
| dimensions in the listing as well. I was definitely shocked
| by how big this actually was when I picked it up in person.
| Not to mention that its 73Kgs! A good chunk of my van's
| weight budget.
| belval wrote:
| Careful with Leaf batteries, they used air for cooling instead
| of water which means that most cells show significant capacity
| loss after a few years.
| epistasis wrote:
| IIRC, this is highly dependent on the climate in which they
| were operated. A battery used in Phoenix may have much bigger
| problems than one from Pacifica.
| mrgzg1 wrote:
| Indeed! More than getting ripped off on capacity, I'm super
| scared of using large capacity lithium batteries in general.
| Having seen small samsung phones blow up, I'm a little scared
| and have a lot of fuses and cut off switches.
| belval wrote:
| To be fair, there is no real contest between a good LiFePO4
| cell and some Samsung battery as thermal runaway on the
| former is near impossible in normal conditions.
| outworlder wrote:
| Climate and usage dependent.
|
| And it's not even a matter of air vs water, is between being
| actively thermal managed or not.
| fnord77 wrote:
| Not sure this will happen if these plans of "1 million mile" EV
| batteries come to fruition.
| rjmunro wrote:
| Quite the opposite. Other parts of the car will wear out at 25%
| of that (or less), so you'll have second use batteries
| available with 75% of their life still in them. People won't
| want to build new cars with old batteries for safety concerns,
| but if these go into containers in a solar farm in a field
| somewhere, the risks are far less - you won't stress them as
| much in regular use, and any emergency will be more contained.
| timerol wrote:
| If they are able to be used in cars for a million miles, they
| will still be able to be used after that at a lower
| performance. It's likely that a used "million mile" battery
| will be even more valuable, since it presumably loses
| performance more slowly than other batteries. So at the point
| where it's performance drops below "useful in EVs," it will
| still have a ton of life left before the performance drops
| below "useful as part of the grid."
| microdrum wrote:
| With the new gen of software-defined inverters, this makes more
| and more sense. The inverter's logic knows RT efficiency, depth
| of charge, and chemical age of the battery. It changes how it
| treats each and every battery.
|
| Think of batteries like hard drives in a hyperscale datacenter.
| coderintherye wrote:
| I was curious about this, anyone else who is curious may find
| this article of interest:
| https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2019/03/smart-inverter...
|
| It's for inverting electricity at grid-scale, not referring to
| a household "inverter". Still quite interesting.
| microdrum wrote:
| That was interesting.
|
| The IQ inverter is for household and small commercial scale.
| For example, I would happily team with a few neighbors to
| cache, say 85kWHr at each home.
| djsumdog wrote:
| Used EV batteries could just be used in cars, but Tesla makes it
| incredibly difficult to fix their crashed vehicles. It's almost
| impossible for regular consumers to buy OEM parts unless it's for
| their specific purchased car. This guy has salvaged batteries and
| tons of other parts from junkyards:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuAMczraBIM
| louwrentius wrote:
| This is done for a soccer stadium in Amsterdam.
|
| https://www.johancruijffarena.nl/default-showon-page/amsterd...
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