Lithium-ion battery recycling took an enormous step ahead this week, as a Hawaiian utility introduced it’s enterprise one of many largest examples of grid-storage recycling in North America thus far.
The Kaua’i Island Utility Cooperative is working with Redwood Supplies to decommission the Anahola Photo voltaic Venture substation and recycle its lithium-ion batteries as a way to make new batteries.
The Anahola recycling mission is among the earliest examples of stationary storage recycling. As such, it units the stage for an anticipated rise in stationary battery storage recycling sooner or later. A Redwood Supplies spokesman mentioned that “profitable decommissioning of those preliminary initiatives serves as an trade mannequin for future gigawatt-scale initiatives.”
By electrical grid requirements, Anahola’s 4-megawatt-hour storage facility is just not huge. Nonetheless, its praise of lithium-ion batteries is among the largest to be recycled to this point. “The factor to remember is that the large-scale lithium-battery sector is comparatively younger,” famous Sam Abuelsamid, the principal analyst for transportation and mobility on the market intelligence agency Guidehouse Insights. “The overwhelming majority of batteries are nowhere close to finish of life but. They’re not prepared for recycling.”
Inbuilt 2015, the Anahola station is sufficiently old that its batteries have reached their finish of life. The station had been utilizing the batteries to retailer energy from 53 acres of photovoltaic panels, which was then used to energy properties, companies, and streetlights on Hawaii’s Kaua’i Island. The ability’s substation included eight stationary energy containers made up of two,320 lithium-ion battery modules in whole. The entire lithium-ion cells employed nickel cobalt aluminum oxide chemistry (NCA). Redwood Supplies wouldn’t title the unique provider of the NCA batteries, however did say it was not Tesla (Redwood Supplies was launched by Tesla cofounder JB Straubel).
Following substation decommissioning, the Anahola photo voltaic facility will proceed to function, however it is going to be a direct-to-grid photo voltaic facility, a Redwood Supplies spokesman mentioned.
Redwood Supplies’ founder JB Straubel [left, in vest] labored with Anahola within the decommissioning and recycling of the substation batteries.Redwood Supplies
Anahola is the largest stationary storage recycling mission for Redwood Supplies thus far, however it’s nonetheless solely a small a part of Redwood’s enterprise. Since its launch in 2017, the corporate has got down to create a “round provide chain” of lithium-ion batteries for electrical autos and clean-energy merchandise. Final yr, it recycled roughly 10 gigawatt-hours of lithium-ion batteries, which might be sufficient for 100,000 electrical autos, the corporate mentioned. A lot of the recycled materials got here from client electronics batteries and manufacturing scrap.
Plans are for a speedy rise in these numbers over the subsequent few years. Final December, Redwood Supplies introduced plans for a US $3.5 billion “Battery Supplies Campus” simply exterior Charleston, S.C., the place it will definitely expects to recycle 100 GWh of battery anode and cathode supplies per yr. The 600-acre campus will likely be one of many largest economic-development initiatives within the historical past of South Carolina.
Such plans are necessary for the way forward for the home battery trade, specialists say, as a result of they’d allow EV and battery producers to supply supplies from inside america. At the moment, supplies comparable to nickel, manganese, lithium, and cobalt are sourced from Indonesia, South Africa, Australia, South America, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and elsewhere.
“As an alternative of mining it within the floor, it simply is smart that it might be cheaper to get better the supplies from recycled, end-of-life objects,” mentioned Jeffrey Spangenberger, group chief for supplies recycling at Argonne Nationwide Laboratory.
Battery producers hope that recycled supplies will allow them to dramatically minimize product value. The U.S. Division of Vitality’s Vitality Storage Grand Problem Roadmap has referred to as for battery-pack prices to be decreased from about $140 per kilowatt-hour immediately to $80/kWh by 2030, and most specialists imagine that recycling would help in that discount as a result of it might diminish the necessity to receive supplies from overseas.
“We now have to get the supplies from someplace,” Spangenberger mentioned. “So the thought is, purchase it as soon as and preserve it right here.”
Grid-storage batteries would play an necessary position in that future plan as a result of these purposes are sometimes very giant, containing hundreds of thousands of lithium-ion cells. Many giant grid-storage websites exist already in North America. In California, huge grid-storage initiatives embody the Moss Touchdown facility in Monterey, which provides 400 megawatts of battery storage, and the McCoy Photo voltaic Vitality mission in Riverside County, which has 230 MW of storage. The Manatee Vitality Storage Middle, in Florida, additionally has 409 MW of battery storage, and the Kaua’I Island Utility Cooperative has a 52-MW battery-storage facility that went on line in 2017. Final yr alone, america deployed 4.8 GW of stationary storage, based on statistics from the American Public Energy Affiliation.
“It’s going to proceed to develop,” Spangenberger mentioned. “That’s why it’s going to be necessary to have the ability to recycle at giant scale.”
From Your Web site Articles
Associated Articles Across the Internet
