That’s actually an ingenious idea I hadn’t thought about. How much cheaper are these batteries once they’ve been retired? Would this be a viable option for someone running solar at home, and wanting to store the power for later use, or is a home battery still the better option?
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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Yea, with a car you can't really use them once the range gets low enough
With this, a bunch of batteries can work together for much longer. You also don't need to worry about weight since they're in one place
A Tesla Model 3, for example, has a battery capacity of 50 to 82 kWh. Let's assume the lowest capacity of 50 kWh. A car battery is basically unusable long before it has lost around half its capacity. So 25 kWh. American households on average consume 10.6 MWh annually or about 29 kWh per day.
So an old Tesla battery still provides enough electricity to power an American household for nearly an entire day.
Really puts into perspective what a monumental waste of energy individual traffic, also with electric cars, is as well.
Well, sort of, it's just that any sort of locomotion requires a lot more energy than you might think.
Yeah sure. But there's a difference between moving a 2 ton vehicle per person or a bike.
There’s also something about their peak current being reduced with age, and in this use case, they don’t really need that peak current, so they really can stay useful for a long time in this use case
I thought I read that this was a plan Tesla had to repurpose the car batteries into power walls for home consumers. Not sure that ever ended up happening but great to see the retired car batteries given a second life
It’s the same cells inside both batteries. The difference is that the used EV car battery will store less power per volume since it’s worn out. It is a wonderful idea. A solar farm doesn’t care as much about volume and weight as a car does. For a home it would be fine as long as you’re trying to squeeze every inch cube of your property.
Im not 100% sure how the batteries are constructed from all of the cells (and I know it depends on the model), but the re-using process can work a lot better than just pulling out the battery and popping it down. EV batteries are in the range of hundreds of volts, but the cells themselves are about 4 volts. It's my understanding that the battery as a whole doesn't uniformly degrade, but you might have individual cells that degrade. If 1 cell in a chain of 10 goes bad, that chain can be made off limits to the battery, so you still technically have 9/10 cells that work fine.
The way a lot of people reuse/recycle/refurb (not sure what the right terminology is in this instance) EV batteries is to test each of the cells themselves, and get rid of the duds, and keep the decent cells. Tesla, for example, all used to use 18650 cells (and I think some models still do), which is the same exact cell that's in decent name-brand cordless power tools.
When you aren't required to keep weight, space, and extra circuitry to a minimum, you can really design a system that squeezes every last drop of usefulness out of those cells before they need to be melted down and remade.
A 50 KWh or more battery pack will be overkill for most homes. But those will likely be available for cheap soon so it might still be a good option. Putting a pack that weighs several hundred kilos in your basement might be difficult, though.
I don’t know that a basement would be a good location regardless. If that thing sparks up, it’ll take out half the building before the fire department shows up.
I use mine as a box spring in my bedroom
Depends on the chemistry. I'd want NMC batteries outside and LFPs can be anywhere.
I'm assuming that doing full charge/discharge cycles on them daily will put more wear on them than every day driving would?
But if your buying them at scrap value and the. Still selling them as scrap after a few more years I guess it works out.
The way lithium batteries work, they wear out less if you only discharge and charge them slightly. So a battery that is charged to 60%, discharged to 40%, and repeated like that will keep most of its capacity even after years of prolonged use. On the other hand, charging a battery quickly, until it is full, or discharging it until it is nearly empty will reduce its capacity over time.
A Tesla Model 3 has a battery capacity of at least 50 kWh. Even if it has lost half of its capacity, the 20% capacity difference between 60% and 40% charge, or more realistically, the 50% difference between 75% and 25%, still represents 12.5 kWh of capacity. Suppose you had an array of 1,000 such batteries. That would represent 12.5 MWh of storage capacity, enough to power ten thousand homes (at 1.2 kW each) for an hour. Certainly nothing to sneeze at.
This flies in the face of everything I thought I knew about charging my phone & laptop
Yea, back in the day, when first phones and laptops were coming out, the tech was different, and was better to fully discharge/charge the battery. Nowadays it's the opposite, but the mith still survives
An easy analogy for batteries nowadays is to see them as an elastic completely relaxed at 50%. At 0% or 100% the elastic would be fully stretched. You want to avoid that to maximize its life
If you have an android there should be a "protect battery" mode that literally caps the charge at 85%
I honestly thought once it got to 100% it stayed mains powered until unplugged to stop overcharging. Never realised 85% was optimal.
I think your right, its not going to keep cooking the battery. The problem is the battery doesn't need to go over 85%. Your supposed to not let it go under 20 or over 85. Kind of hard to do.
The voltage of a Lipo corresponds to it's charge level. So a Lipo at 4.2V (or in case of high voltage Lipos 4.35V) is full.
Up to ~80% of the charge, the lipo is charged by current limiting (basically, the voltage of the charging circuit raises so that it stays so much above the cell battery that it's charging at a set current). This is the fast charging part of the charging process.
After the charging voltage reaches the maximum allowed cell voltage (4.2V/4.35V), the charging circuit cannot go above that voltage because it would risk overcharging and blowing up the cell. So the carging circuit holds the voltage at maximum level until the cell voltage catches up. Since the voltage difference shrinks with every bit of charge on the cell, so does the charging speed.
That's why you only see "Charges the phone from 0-80% in X minutes" in the ads, and not 0-100%.
This means, that the charger in incapable of overcharging the phone.
But keeping the charger running even though it doesn't charge the phone anymore wastes energy, so what they do once you reach 100% is that it will disable the charger until the voltage is down to 95%, when it will resume charging. That's why it's quite likely if you unplug the phone after charging overnight, that the battery is not at 100%, but slightly below.
Thanks, I knew it was better to not fully charge lithium ion batteries, but I didn't know Android had a setting for this. Just enabled it now.
The old rules applied to nickel batteries or whatever the last gen was called.
NiCd was the one with the bad memory effect that required full charging cycles. They where also really toxic which is why they are illegal in many countries now.
NiMh hardly had any memory effect left, but would degrade comparatively quickly.
Li-Ion/Li-Po is what we currently have. They don't like to be full or empty for long times and like shallow charging cycles.
I've seen some interesting use cases for EVs themselves as a form of energy storage. Not necessarily to discharge as a voltage regulation mechanism, but as a predictive load for evening daily swing.
as a predictive load for evening daily swing
What do you mean by that?
Being packed away in a static location has much lower energy density requirements than driving around with the battery on-board. Getting the most out of them and then reprocessing the materials seems better than just reprocessing right away once they're no longer useful for EVs.
Exactly, it goes from being about the capacity:weight ratio to capacity:cost and as a bonus also postpones having to use powernto recycle them (and hopefully it'll be cheaper/more efficient to do so then).
This is a way to get off gas as it's used for reliability and voltage regulation. There's a few locations running pilots with different energy storage techs like this. One of the main problems with integrating renewables is they aren't dispatchable generation so you're basically throwing unknowns in to the system. This is mediated through programs like demand response and load following with gas, but the goal of decommissioning gas and fossils entirely while still providing reliability is hampered because of this gap in capability. Renewables paired with storage would accommodate more less flexible renewables and SMRs, and allow for more electrification of the economy with less climate impact. More electric arc furnaces!
What an atrociously dangerous planned design.
- Poor design: Thermal runaway is a serious problem that this setup has a very high chance of occurring. When it occurs, not if, it will spread fast from one container to the next and it will not be able to be put out that is the current fire fighting procedure for the state.
- It is very dangerous because these old batteries produce a very toxic and dangerous compounds when in thermal runaway. Again firefighting procedures cover hazmat requirements and it’s well documented the dangerous compounds that are present especially in these older batteries.
Net result. It will create another unstoppable fire that will dump poisons into ground water and the air recklessly endangering anyone down wind.
Solutions not problems:
- Isolate each container in an empty dam that is able to be filled with super chilled salt water the moment a runaway begins.
- Design fire suppression and shutdown to protect residents and the grid. Keep personal onsite to monitor with the authority to immediately react to fire incidents.
Do you think the engineers haven't thought about that?
Do you think personal safety, firefighting ability, and effects on the environment has informed the design of like… anything in the last 50 years?
“Faster to catch fire, faster to spread, faster to catastrophically fail, more dangerous to life and health, and worse for the environment when it does so” describes anything from modern house construction to vehicle manufacturing.
Priority one is “cheaper”, the rest is just noise.
They actually have not thought of that no. In fact there is a cult like level of ignorance that has already just caused a serious fire & toxic release with this exact same hair brain layout and design. That said the method of fire containment is very new out of the Netherlands I believe.
After hearing jokes about college professors evacuating planes when they hear that their students designed them? Wouldn't put it past em. Even experts make big mistakes.
Imagine that box there gets hit by lightning.
I mean, okay, but how much of anything can get hit by lightning and not be a smoldering crater without proper grounding and such?
One of my grandmothers great uncles.