Redwood Materials Will Recycle Hawaiian Grid Batteries

Lithium-ion battery recycling took an enormous step ahead this week, as a Hawaiian utility introduced it’s enterprise one of many greatest examples of grid-storage recycling in North America thus far.

The Kaua’i Island Utility Cooperative is working with Redwood Materials to decommission the Anahola Photo voltaic Mission substation and recycle its lithium-ion batteries in an effort to make new batteries.

The Anahola recycling challenge 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 stated that “profitable decommissioning of those preliminary initiatives serves as an business mannequin for future gigawatt-scale initiatives.”

By electrical grid requirements, Anahola’s 4-megawatt-hour storage facility will not be large. Nevertheless, its praise of lithium-ion batteries is among the largest to be recycled so far. “The factor to bear in mind 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 houses, companies, and streetlights on Hawaii’s Kaua’i Island. The power’s substation included eight stationary energy containers made up of two,320 lithium-ion battery modules in complete. All the lithium-ion cells employed nickel cobalt aluminum oxide chemistry (NCA). Redwood Supplies wouldn’t identify 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 will likely be a direct-to-grid photo voltaic facility, a Redwood Supplies spokesman stated.

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 challenge 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 electric vehicles 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 stated. A lot of the recycled materials got here from consumer electronics batteries and manufacturing scrap.

Plans are for a speedy rise in these numbers over the following few years. Final December, Redwood Supplies introduced plans for a US $3.5 billion “Battery Materials Campus” simply outdoors 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 can be one of many greatest economic-development initiatives within the historical past of South Carolina.

Such plans are essential for the way forward for the home battery business, consultants say, as a result of they’d allow EV and battery producers to supply supplies from inside the USA. Presently, supplies reminiscent of 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 will be cheaper to get well the supplies from recycled, end-of-life gadgets,” stated 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 Energy Storage Grand Challenge Roadmap has known as for battery-pack prices to be diminished from about $140 per kilowatt-hour as we speak to $80/kWh by 2030, and most consultants imagine that recycling would assist in that discount as a result of it will diminish the necessity to receive supplies from overseas.

“We’ve to get the supplies from someplace,” Spangenberger stated. “So the concept is, purchase it as soon as and preserve it right here.”

Grid-storage batteries would play an essential function in that future plan as a result of these functions are sometimes very giant, containing tens of millions of lithium-ion cells. Many giant grid-storage websites exist already in North America. In California, large grid-storage initiatives embrace the Moss Touchdown facility in Monterey, which presents 400 megawatts of battery storage, and the McCoy Photo voltaic Vitality challenge in Riverside County, which has 230 MW of storage. The Manatee Vitality Storage Heart, 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, the USA deployed 4.8 GW of stationary storage, in keeping with statistics from the American Public Energy Affiliation.

“It’s going to proceed to develop,” Spangenberger stated. “That’s why it’s going to be essential to have the ability to recycle at giant scale.”