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In the medium and heavy vehicle industry one of the big discussions is on reuse of batteries at economic EOL. The idea is that after maybe 600 charge cycles a v
by plorg 3y ago
In the medium and heavy vehicle industry one of the big discussions is on reuse of batteries at economic EOL. The idea is that after maybe 600 charge cycles a vehicle-sized battery will have a lot of life left but will no longer support the range that high-duty-cycle vehicles require. So they can be recycled into grid storage in a way that creates a virtuous cycle.
Battery swapping might even be a good way to jump start such a system since it could produce a flexible system for curve flattening both by charging in off-peak hours while still supporting fixed-installation vehicle packs.
The downside is that this makes battery systems less flexible, since batteries have to be of some fixed physical dimensions. This may not be practical for certain compact vehicles, but could be implemented more easily with straight trucks.
- mschuster91 3y agoAs long as the packs can be taken out of the vehicle without damaging either and the packs don't have DRM crap, packs can trivially be re-used by attaching them to a charge controller.
- wilg 3y agoThe batteries can be recycled into raw materials and rebuilt as new packs with full health at greater than 99% efficiency.
- plorg 3y agoI think the idea is that it costs much more labor and energy to fully recycle a battery pack than to repurpose it, and you can always do the recycling later on. If you're suggesting the time, energy, and safety and compromises required to design vehicles around modular batteries might not be offset by the cost delta of recycling I think that's a reasonable concern. Combining this with swappable packs might change the variables. A system by which packs are routinely switched out and frequently tested could easily lead to a robust circular economy and could provide a better alternative to Vehicle To Grid solutions for load shifting.
- wilg 3y agoI think vehicles should have replaceable packs for service, but not beyond that without a really strong argument. These batteries degrade over a few years to about 80% and just sort of stay there for a long time. So just making them big enough to allow them to remain useful for 10-20 years seems more than good enough.