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Using Old Electric Vehicle Batteries to Power the Grid

Watch this video to hear ARPA-E Program Director Dr. Scott Litzelman and Dr. Antoni Tong and Mike Ferry from Smartville explain how the team has developed technology to condition batteries for resale to create a scalable, low-cost stationary storage system.

Topics:
Batteries Energy Power

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:00 the trends we're seeing in evs are really exciting given how many car manufacturers are going to be producing more evs in the future but also creates a potential challenge off in the distance which is what happens to all those ev battery packs when they reach their end of life and the ucsd project from open 2018 is taking that challenge and they're turning into an opportunity

    00:00:21 which is to leverage and use those ev packs for second life applications for stationary storage it's really exciting to see an rpe project go from a proposal that you read and an idea saying okay this is an interesting idea to a successful project but then to a company so what the ucsd team is they spent on a company called smart bill and they've raised funding from the california

    00:00:44 energy commission and several other sources and this is something that's not just you know going to be academic papers this is something that they want to start building systems and you know building multiple sites where they can condition and sell these things and start selling them to great applications pretty soon so it's just really exciting to see how

    00:01:00 quickly the innovation lab is starting to make its way to the market smallville is creating a unique dual-purpose infrastructure it's a battery repurposing platform and the energy storage plant at the same time through specialized power conversion control and the data intelligence the facility will improve used battery performance and extend use for life by

    00:01:23 simply operating the battery in a distributed fashion re-establish uniformity and reduce performance uncertainty as a result producing certifiable and reliable energy storage products at the same time the facility can provide a greater connected large-scale energy storage capacity the integrated solution incentivizes

    00:01:46 battery with greater health to work harder bringing the entire system within balance and overall uniformity maintaining battery uniformity is a key for all battery energy storage systems even with new ones enforcing used batteries are even harder

    00:02:04 but the smartwheel is showing a pathway to achieve that not too long ago the batteries within these enclosures were powering electric cars and we have batteries from three different vehicle models and from 12 separate cars all operating as a single reliable energy storage system

    00:02:20 smart bill's goal is to have commercially available units just like these within 18 months in three years we hope to have a scaled facility that's both processing batteries and manufacturing product and within 10 years we hope to have multiple large-scale facilities operating across the nation the next challenge for smarville is

    00:02:41 aggregating our key components in a single building block design compatible with the majority of ev makes and models and so far we have been successful at prototyping and are currently iterating our modular assembly battery units or moabs it reduces a lot of challenges around recycling and sustainability concerns

    00:03:04 and you know end-of-life concerns for lithium-ion there's there's a lot of concerns about that from it from a sustainability point of view and there's also concerns about that from just a sourcing point of view what are lithium supply chains going to look like in a few years what are nickel and cobalt supply chains look like there are significant concerns and so if we can

    00:03:20 extend the life of these systems it really alleviates a lot of those problems lithium batteries can live forever what i mean by that is the core materials in lithium batteries don't degrade or get used up they can be recycled and reused in a virtually endless circular economy of production smartville wants to play a key role in

    00:03:39 that vision and we think we have the technology to do it [Music] you