What Do You Do With Old EV Batteries?

The growing popularity of electric vehicles has led to a significant shift in the way we perceive cars as they age. For internal combustion vehicles, the historic concern has involved issues such as emissions — drive a car that’s 50 years old and you might soon learn that it pollutes more than most states will allow by 2025. For aging EVs, there’s a different question: what do you do with batteries as they lose their ability to hold a charge?

Battery life plays a part in things like the depreciation of used EVs. But it also raises another question: what happens when an EV’s batteries are no longer capable of holding enough of a charge to allow for long drives, but can still hold enough of a charge that the battery retains some functionality?

That’s where Redwood Materials comes in. The company, founded by former Tesla CTO J.B. Straubel, has embarked on an extensive campaign to recycle old EV batteries. In 2022, Redwood Materials announced a deal with Audi and Volkswagen that allowed them to recycle the automakers’ old batteries. According to the company itself, it handles recycling for “more than 70% of battery packs from across North America.”

This month, the company announced that it’s getting into the energy business — and batteries that are too old to support a car but still functional enough to hold a significant charge are at the center of it. Their plan: use these batteries to keep microgrids running, including one that keeps a data center for Crusoe operational.

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In an article for The Verge, Andrew J. Hawkins went into greater detail about the specifics of Redwood’s plans, including the fact that the batteries that they’re using for Redwood Energy have “up to 50 percent” of their capacity still available. The company also sees plenty of growth potential here, for obvious reasons — the more EVs people buy, the faster old EVs will go out of service. It’s a pragmatic solution to multiple problems.