What is Reuse & Second Life?
Batteries aren’t dead when they come to the end of their useful life in an electric vehicle.
Reused or ‘second-life’ lithium batteries still have lots of power left in them, EV batteries are typically replaced after they lose around 20% of their capacity, which means that there’s still up to 80 percent remaining that could be used for stationary storage applications.
The second life battery (SLB) market provides a promising opportunity to deal with early generations of spent EV batteries – particularly in stationary energy storage (SES) applications. Reuse can provide the most value in markets where there is demand for batteries for stationary energy-storage applications that require less-frequent battery cycling (for example, 100 to 300 cycles per year). There are three applications that are most suitable for second-life EV batteries: providing reserve energy capacity to maintain a utility’s power reliability at lower cost by displacing more expensive and less efficient assets (for instance, old combined-cycle gas turbines), deferring transmission and distribution investments, and taking advantage of power-arbitrage opportunities by storing renewable power for use during periods of scarcity, thus providing greater grid flexibility and firming to the grid.
The shift of electric vehicles into mainstream use has already disrupted the automotive value chain in significant ways and is now on the verge of disrupting the energy-storage value chain as well. The need to dispose of millions of EV batteries in the future has already led to the emergence of new recycling and reuse industries, creating new value pools with new potential to harness and integrate renewable power into our grids.
At Cawleys’ Lithium Battery Recycling Solutions we can offer second life options to most car-manufacturer-made batteries and this leads to the manufacturing of power supplies at a fully licenced facility, ensuring the highest levels of compliance and responsibility are met.
Our experts can provide a full consultancy service with help and advice on all aspects of lithium-ion battery storage, transportation and recycling. With specialists in lithium battery dismantling and our very own state of the art workshop, we have all the required tools and facilities to safely discharge and dismantle used and damaged batteries to extract as many re-usable cells as possible.
