POWER-GRID RESILIENCEHundreds of Old EV Batteries Have New Jobs in Texas: Stabilizing the Power Grid
After reaching the end of their automotive lives, the batteries are being reused to provide lower-cost grid energy storage.
East of San Antonio in Bexar County, 500 electric vehicle batteries at the end of their automotive lives will soon be repurposed to provide energy storage for Texas’ electric grid, a California company, B2U Storage Solutions, announced last week.
The batteries, housed in 21 cabinets the size of shipping containers, create a second life for the technology made from critical minerals, including lithium, nickel and cobalt, for another eight years, said Freeman Hall, co-founder and CEO.
Once the site is built and in operation later this year, the batteries will charge when there is an excess of renewable energy production on the grid and the cost of power is cheap. The Texas facility will have a total capacity of 24 megawatt hours.
B2U Storage Solutions, based in Los Angeles, plans to deploy three more grid storage projects in Texas throughout the next year, totaling 100 megawatt hours across the state, the company said. Assuming the average household uses 30 kilowatt hours per day, it’s enough energy to power 3,330 homes for a day, Hall said.
The site near San Antonio will interconnect to the CPS Energy distribution system, one of the nation’s largest city-owned utility companies.
“We’re really helping to pioneer and demonstrate to the automotive industry that repurposing makes a lot of sense for a pretty healthy number of batteries before they’re truly ready for end of life and recycling,” Hall said in an interview.
Hall and Chief Operating Officer Michael Stern began building industrial-scale solar projects almost 20 years ago in the California cities of Palmdale, El Centro and Mojave, installing some 100 megawatts, or enough electricity to power more than 15,000 homes.
But soon, as more solar began connecting to the grid, their bids to utilities were undermined by a developing “duck curve”—industry shorthand for when higher penetration of renewables on the grid depresses energy prices during sunlit hours followed by a cost spike in the evening as there’s a loss of sun.
“That’s what inspired us to realize that we needed to add storage to our projects,” Hall said. “Along the way, we had an epiphany.”
