[HN Gopher] Can "second life" EV batteries work as grid-scale en...
___________________________________________________________________
Can "second life" EV batteries work as grid-scale energy storage?
Author : davidw
Score : 86 points
Date : 2025-10-23 18:15 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.volts.wtf)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.volts.wtf)
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| This is less useful than most people expected. Redwood has been
| struggling because the expected battery turnover is not
| occurring. EV batteries are lasting a long time, so they stay in
| the car are and not being recycled or reused in any quantity yet.
|
| If EV batteries last 20+ years in EV's, it'll be > 2040 before
| there are significant numbers of EV batteries available to
| recycle or reuse.
|
| https://www.geotab.com/blog/ev-battery-health/
| jeffbee wrote:
| There is one constant to all these conversations and that is
| Silicon Valley tech dudes are grossly misinformed about the
| lifecycle of things. Solar panels don't wear out, batteries
| don't wear out as fast as they used to. This is evidenced both
| by undertaking weird dead-end startup ideas, and being
| susceptible to propaganda about the supposed downsides of solar
| energy and batteries.
| pfdietz wrote:
| So, basically the same reason recycling of PV modules hasn't
| taken off.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I've been intrigued by used solar panels for sale, seems like
| you can get an amazing price for ones that are only lightly
| degraded. Is there a downside, or do you just mean that it
| isn't popular currently?
| jeffbee wrote:
| I think they were referring to the fact that the chief
| reason there is not large-scale PV panel recycling is that
| very few panels have ever been retired. It turns out that
| short of physical destruction by hail etc a PV panel does
| not degrade beyond economic usefulness simply by being out
| in the sun. In fact some panels actually get more powerful.
| The surprising-to-some conclusion of NREL's PV Lifetime
| Project is that the economic lifetime of a PV panel is
| basically forever.
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| In addition to my sibling comment: The cost of the panels
| is a rather small fraction of the total cost of a typical
| installation. Most of that cost ist labor, some regulatory
| requirements and the inverter. Whether you pay a factor of
| 2 for the panels or not typically doesn't matter. In other
| words: Reusing used panels will only ever be able to safe
| you a minuscule amount.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The low cost of the modules themselves has led to the
| suggestion of cost optimized DC-coupled PV systems being
| used to directly drive resistive heaters. The cost per
| unit of thermal energy in a cost optimized system
| moderate scale system (> residential, < utility scale)
| may be in the range of $3-5/GJ, very competitive with
| natural gas. Low cost maximum power point trackers would
| be useful; inverters would not be needed.
|
| Low cost modules allow one to do away with things like
| optimally tilted modules and single axis tracking. The
| modules can also be tightly packed, reducing mounting and
| wiring costs.
| maxerickson wrote:
| What's the proposed system design? For example, in
| January, I get about 9 hours of sunlight and have an
| average daily high of 25 F. I'm gonna need to store heat
| somehow or another.
| hinkley wrote:
| These days it's a stack of microinverters. Which are not
| cheaper but do improve array efficiency outside of idea
| conditions. But that's another up front cost.
| ericd wrote:
| Yeah, we paid more for the little bits of metal that held
| up the panels than for the panels themselves (aluminum,
| but still).
| duskwuff wrote:
| How much of a difference does it actually make in terms of
| the all-inclusive price of installation (e.g. panels,
| inverters, mounting hardware, and labor)?
|
| (Asking because I genuinely don't know, not because I have
| a specific answer in mind.)
| hinkley wrote:
| Find an installer who will warranty work using third
| party let alone used solar panels and then we can talk.
| dylan604 wrote:
| From TFA:
|
| David Roberts
|
| When did automotive batteries become the majority of your input
| by volume?
|
| Colin Campbell
|
| That is a good question.
|
| David Roberts
|
| Was it recent or was that early on?
|
| Colin Campbell
|
| I would say the transition to EV batteries dominating what we
| received, it's been in the last year or 18 months.
|
| David Roberts
|
| So the front edge of a very large wave of batteries has begun
| to arrive?
|
| Colin Campbell
|
| Yeah, the wave is out there, it's coming. The waters have
| finally started to arrive at the beach here.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Reading between the lines of the corporate speak will
| validate my point. Redwood was founded in 2017.
| dylan604 wrote:
| "It's the largest microgrid in North America and it's the
| largest second-energy storage site in the world. So that's
| like you said at the top, it's a 12-megawatt AC,
| 63-megawatt-hour grid supporting about 2 or 3 megawatts of
| data centers and run by solar. So all the energy comes from
| another 12 megawatts of solar."
|
| Sure, so while not supplying power to a city, they are
| proving this is viable. Just because it's not "turn off the
| coal plants now" moment doesn't mean this isn't a very good
| direction. Everyone has to start and grow. I don't
| understand the whole shit on something because it's not an
| immediate solve. If these guys waited until 2040 to start
| the business, well, that'd just be dumb. It essentially
| sounds like capacity will just continue to increase year
| over year, maybe around 2040 there will be a huge spike.
| Doesn't seem like anything is wrong here.
| jeffbee wrote:
| He's just talking his book. Their deployment this year was
| 1/4000th share of the BESS market.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Battery Energy Storage System for anyone else like me that
| has no knowledge of this world and their acronyms.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| A lot of the early EV battery life projections were based on
| Nissan Leaf Gen 1. Which had a horrendous battery pack that
| combined poor choice of chemistry, aggressive usage and a
| complete lack of active cooling.
|
| When EVs with good battery pack engineering started hitting the
| streets, they outperformed those early projections by a lot.
| And by now, it's getting clear that battery pack isn't as much
| of a concern - with some of the better designs, like in early
| Teslas, losing about 5-15% of their capacity over a decade of
| use.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I'll defend the leaf a little.
|
| LiPo batteries were quiet expensive when it was initially
| released. NiMH was really the only option in town.
|
| And with a lower energy density battery that's also heavier,
| adding a cooling system would have also added a bunch of
| weight to the already heavy car with a barely usable range of
| 100 miles.
|
| Gen 2, however, had no excuses. They had every opportunity to
| add active cooling and they still decided to go with just air
| cooling.
| wcfields wrote:
| On the used market you'll find absolutely cooked
| (literally) Leafs whose first life was in Arizona and
| barely have enough range to back out of the driveway.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I have a gen 1 leaf with a remaining range of about 500
| yards if you drive gently...
|
| I use it in my driveway to make it look to thieves like
| someone is home (round me, houses with no car get broken
| into).
| MrRadar wrote:
| Every generation of the production Nissan Leaf has used
| lithium batteries. AFAIK no modern (~post-2000) mass-
| produced (>10k units sold) EV has ever used NiMH or lead-
| acid batteries.
|
| Edit: Checking Wikipedia to verify my information, I found
| out that Nissan actually sold a lithium-battery EV in
| _1997_ to comply with the same 90s CARB zero-emissions
| vehicle mandate that gave us the GM EV-1:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_R%27nessa#Nissan_Altra
| formerly_proven wrote:
| EVs no, but I think some Toyota hybrids (which are of
| course not even PHEVs) still use NiMH. Toyota tends to be
| very tight-lipped about their batteries and their sizes
| (or rather, lack thereof).
| numpad0 wrote:
| Tends to be tight lipped??? It is in the catalog[1]! It
| is more that American consumers aren't tech obsessed than
| Toyota being reluctant to share.
|
| Even just looking at online media reports[2][3] clearly
| sourced from some exact same press event, it is obvious
| that US English equivalents are much lighter in content
| than Japanese versions. They're putting the information
| out, no one's reading it. It's just been the types of
| information that didn't drive clicks. Language barrier
| would have effects on it too, that Toyota is a Japanese
| company and US is an export market, but it's
| fundamentally the same phenomenon as citizen facing
| government reports that never gets read and often
| imagined as being "hidden and withheld from public eyes",
| just a communication issue.
|
| 1: https://www.toyota.com/priuspluginhybrid/features/mpg_
| other_...
|
| 2: https://www.motortrend.com/news/toyota-aqua-prius-c-
| hybrid-b...
|
| 3: https://car.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/1339263.html
| avhception wrote:
| It's nice to get a reminder about this problem once in a
| while, I've fallen into the trap myself at times.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Leaf Gen 1 didn't have NiMH. It had a lithium-based battery
| chemistry, but some bastard offshoot of it. One that really
| didn't fare well under high current draw, or deep
| discharge, or high temperatures, or being looked at wrong.
| xattt wrote:
| NiMH was used in Priuses for a very long time, and these
| seem to have lasted for ages.
| floxy wrote:
| Don't forget that the original Leaf pack was only 24 kWh. So
| if you assume a ~1000 full-equivalent-charge-cycles lifespan,
| then the large Gen2 62 kWh pack will live 2.5 times longer
| than an original 24 kWh pack. If you average 3.5 miles/kWh,
| the 24 kWh battery will be expected to last somewhere around
| 84,000 miles. While the 62 kWh pack will last for 217,000
| miles.
|
| https://coolienergy.com/lfp-vs-nmc-batteries-the-science-
| beh...
| jbm wrote:
| I am a bit more concerned about batteries now as opposed to
| an year ago.
|
| We had this article from Elektrek [1] about battery issues in
| South Korea. When I asked my local electric maintenance shop
| [2, sorry for the FB link], they said they have started
| seeing the same issue in Model 3s and Ys in Canada as well.
| (They also said that it is too early to tell how common it
| would become)
|
| This may bode well for recycling since the issues is an
| unbalance, not the whole pack failing.
|
| [1] https://electrek.co/2025/10/14/tesla-is-at-risk-of-
| lossing-s...
|
| [2] https://www.facebook.com/groups/albertaEV/posts/248558844
| 207...
| whatever1 wrote:
| We are only 5-6 years into the car ev market. Tesla model 3
| started being sold in 2018 in meaningful numbers
| cogman10 wrote:
| Still have mine. Battery capacity is around 80% of the new
| capacity. I'm not planning on switching anytime soon as it's
| got plenty of range still. I'll probably swap the pack out
| when it hits 70% in the next 2 or 3 years.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| It probably will take a lot longer than that to hit 70%.
| Degradation on Tesla batteries slows down considerably
| after it hits 85%.
|
| there are exceptions, though.
| p1necone wrote:
| > "most people"
|
| "most people" even now are just parroting dumb FUD they read on
| facebook. You really shouldn't give any weight to the opinions
| of laypeople on topics that are as heavily propagandized and
| politically charged as renewable energy.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Tesla batteries fail after 8 years at least from models up to
| 2014
| stetrain wrote:
| The number of Teslas sold up to 2014 is less than 1% of all
| Teslas sold.
|
| Tesla has an 8-year battery and drivetrain warranty but they
| don't necessarily fail after that date.
| trhway wrote:
| Prius Plugin 2015 (last year of that model) - full
| charge/discharge at least 3-4 times a week, currently still a
| bit more than 80% of capacity (granted the battery seems
| somewhat overbuilt, yet it is normally does 10-15C which is
| much tougher mode than in a pure EV where 2-3C is usually
| enough and only high-end Teslas and the likes would do 5-6C).
| There has been large continuous improvement in lithium
| batteries over the last couple decades.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| [citation needed]
| JohnLocke4 wrote:
| In 2040 fusion energy advancements will have gotten far enough
| to be the next technological step and make this redundant
| anyway
| epistasis wrote:
| There's currently no technological path for fusion to be
| cheaper than fission. It would require a technological
| breakthrough that we have not yet imagined.
|
| And already, solar plus storage is cheaper than new nuclear.
| And solar and storage are getting cheaper at a tremendous
| rate.
|
| It's hard to imagine a scenario where fusion could ever catch
| up to solar and storage technology. It may be useful in
| places with poor solar resources, like fission is now, but
| that's a very very long time from now.
| noosphr wrote:
| The low energy future that was envisioned is not happening.
|
| The AI arms race, which has become an actual arms race in
| the war in Ukraine, needs endless energy all times a day.
|
| China is already winning the AI cold war because it adds
| more capacity to its grid a year than Germany has in a
| century.
|
| If we keep going with agrarian methods of energy production
| don't be surprised that we suffer the same fate as the
| agrarian societies of the 19th century. Any country that
| doesn't have the capability to train and build drones on
| mass won't be a country for long.
| epistasis wrote:
| You have that exactly backwards: solar + storage is what
| will give us energy abundance at less money than we could
| ever imagine from nuclear fission or fusion.
|
| China is winning the AI Cold war because it's adding
| solar, storage, and wind at orders of magnitude more than
| nuclear.
|
| I'm not sure who's doing your supposed "envisioning" but
| there is no vision for cheap abundant energy from fusion.
| Solar and storage deliver it today, fusion only delivers
| it in sci fi books.
|
| Nuclear is 20th century technology that does not fit with
| a highly automated future. With high levels of
| automation, construction is super expensive. You want to
| spend your expensive construction labor on building
| factories, not individual power generation sites.
|
| Building factories for solar and storage lets them scale
| to a degree that nuclear could _never_ scale. Nuclear has
| basically no way of catching up.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > sci fi books
|
| I blame these for the unquestioned belief that fusion is
| desirable. It's a _trope_ because it enables stories to
| be told, and because readers became used to seeing, not
| because science fiction has a good track record on such
| things.
|
| The fact that the volumetric power density of ARC is 40x
| worse than a PWR (and ITER, 400x worse!) should tell one
| that DT fusion at least is unlikely to be cheap.
|
| With continued progress down the experience curve, PV
| will reach the point where resistive heat is cheaper than
| burning natural gas at the Henry Hub price (which doesn't
| include the cost of getting gas through pipelines and
| distribution to customers.) And remember cheap natural
| gas was what destroyed the last nuclear renaissance in
| the US.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| It's hard to imagine a form of energy production less
| desirable than fusion.
|
| Okay, sure, burning lignite and using the exhaust as air
| heating in the children's hospital. You got me.
| noosphr wrote:
| China has been building out nuclear capacity at 5% a year
| for 25 years.
|
| Solar and wind capacity had shot through the roof in the
| last five years because they can't sell hardware to the
| west any more.
|
| The other big item is hydro power, which China has a ton
| of untapped potential for. Unfortunately for the West
| every good river has already been damed so we can't
| follow them there.
| epistasis wrote:
| > Solar and wind capacity had shot through the roof in
| the last five years because they can't sell hardware to
| the west any more.
|
| "can't sell hardware??" hah! I've never heard that weird
| made-up justification, where did you pick it up from?
|
| China installed 277GW of solar in 2024, capacity factor
| corrected that's 55.4 GW of solar power. That's
| equivalent to _the entire amount of nuclear_ that China
| has ever built. One year versus all time. And then in the
| _first half_ of 2025, China installed another 212GW of
| solar. In six months.
|
| Nuclear is a footnote compared to the planned deployment
| of solar and wind and storage in China.
|
| Anybody who's serious about energy is deploying massive
| amounts of solar, storage, and some wind. Some people
| that are slow to adapt are still building gas or coal,
| but these will be stranded assets far before their end of
| life. Nuclear fusion and fission are meme technologies,
| unable to compete with the scale and scope that batteries
| and solar deliver every day. This mismatch grows by the
| month.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Fission is expensive for regulation reasons more than
| technological reasons, so if fusion doesn't face the same
| barriers then it could be cheaper than fission.
|
| But I agree that it doesn't look like fusion is going to be
| cheap any time soon.
| apendleton wrote:
| > It would require a technological breakthrough that we
| have not yet imagined.
|
| Maybe, but not necessarily. The necessary breakthrough
| might have been high-temperature superconducting magnets,
| in which case not only has it been imagined, but it has
| already occurred, and we're just waiting for the
| engineering atop that breakthrough to progress enough to
| demonstrate a working prototype (the magnets have been
| demonstrated but a complete reactor using them hasn't yet).
|
| Or it might be that the attempts at building such a
| prototype don't pan out, and some other breakthrough is
| indeed needed. It'll probably be a couple of years until we
| know for sure, but at this point I don't think there's
| enough data to say one way or the other.
|
| > And already, solar plus storage is cheaper than new
| nuclear.
|
| It depends how much storage you mean. If you're only
| worried about sub-24h load-shifting (like, enough to handle
| a day/night cycle on a sunny day), this is certainly true.
| If you care about having enough to cover for extended bad
| weather, or worse yet, for seasonal load-shifting (banking
| power in the summer to cover the winter), the economics of
| solar plus storage remain abysmal: the additional batteries
| you need cost just as much as the ones you needed for daily
| coverage, but get cycled way less and so are much harder to
| pay for. If the plan is to use solar and storage for _all
| generation_, though, that's the number that matters.
| Comparing LCoE of solar plus daily storage with the LCoE of
| fixed-firm or on-demand generation is apples-and-oranges.
|
| I think solar plus storage absolutely has the potential to
| get there, but that too will likely require fundamental
| breakthroughs (probably in the form of much cheaper
| storage: perhaps something like Form Energy's iron-air
| batteries).
| pfdietz wrote:
| High temperature superconducting magnets are not a
| panacea for the problems with DT fusion. Those issues
| follow from limits on power/area at the first wall, and
| the needed thickness of the first wall; these ensure DT
| reactors will have low volumetric power density,
| regardless of the confinement scheme used.
|
| With HTSC magnets, a tokamak much smaller than ITER could
| be built, but ITER is so horrifically bad that one can be
| much better than it and still be impractical.
| epistasis wrote:
| And these are not new issues, they've been known for more
| than 40 years, but never addressed. From the 1983 Led
|
| > But even though radiation damage rates and heat
| transfer requirements are much more severe in a fusion
| reactor, the power density is only one-tenth as large.
| This is a strong indication that fusion would be
| substantially more expensive than fission because, to put
| it simply, greater effort would be required to produce
| less power.
|
| https://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-
| Tro...
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The regulatory hurdles are probably bigger than the
| difficult enough technological ones you mention.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This is like a "fusion is only 20 years away" (or 15 in this
| case) joke, right?
| hinkley wrote:
| It used to be 30. So fifty more years?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Yep, it was 30 years at the 60s. If it keeps halving
| every 85 years, we'll get it approximately never :)
| megaman821 wrote:
| The steam generator that the fusion generator connects to
| might be more expensive than solar at this point. That would
| me even if fusion cost nothing and had infinite amounts of
| fuel, there would be no customers for its energy on a sunny
| afternoon.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Redwood has been struggling because the expected battery
| turnover is not occurring_
|
| Redwood pitched recycling. But its principal business was
| primary production. (Processed black mass is analogous to
| lithium ore.) They're struggling because demand for American-
| made batteries remains low.
| Theodores wrote:
| The typical EV industry trade show has a small handful of cars
| and a vast amount of tangential businesses including many
| finance options, a vast amount of home charger gizmos, fast
| charging gizmos, electricity suppliers and the companies
| promising grid-scale storage, either from actively used cars or
| recycled EV batteries. There is a vast constellation of this
| stuff, with specialist insurance companies that nobody really
| asked for outnumbering the car brands or even e-bike brands
| present.
|
| In time there will be consolidation. This constellation of EV
| startup bottom-feeders will be decimated along with the
| 'excuses' to not make money.
|
| I don't think the problem is that EV batteries are lasting
| longer, it is just that the EV market from before the Model 3
| came along is miniscule. Hence not many second hand batteries
| to recycle.
|
| As for EV batteries and their availability, when was the last
| time you saw an OG Tesla Model S with the fake grill? Those
| cars used to be everywhere, but where are they now? The German
| EVs that came out to compete, for example, Taycan and eTron,
| those things are not going to last the distance since the
| repairs cost a fortune and the parts supply is limited.
|
| All considered, there will come a time before 2040+ when there
| are large quantities of these electric car batteries to
| upcycle, by which time the EV business will be consolidated
| with only a few players.
|
| If there was money in recycling cars then every auto
| manufacturer would be in on it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Without being a battery chemistry expert, why do these battery
| packs become not useful for an EV yet could still be useful for
| energy storage. They keep saying that 80% of life becomes
| unusable for EV, but that's still a lot of life. Is it that grid
| energy is more of a constant drain while the EV is lots of hard
| pulls (for lack of better wording)? In an EV, the battery cannot
| provide the higher volts being requested within rating, but a
| grid is never demanding peak performance?
| MarioMan wrote:
| Space and weight are serious constraints in the car space, but
| not such a big deal on the side of a house. That's how they
| retain their usefulness.
|
| 80% could indeed be plenty of usable life for _your_ EV use
| cases, but it strongly depends on usage patterns. More
| degradation means more trips to the charger on a road trip. It
| means trips that you'd regularly make just charging at home at
| the end of day now require you to plug in at the destination
| too. It means more range anxiety as a whole.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| For an EV you want a high energy density, because it impacts
| range. For grid storage, density doesn't matter as much.
| benzible wrote:
| It's not just about capacity (80% is still a lot), it's that
| degraded batteries lose their ability to deliver high current
| under load--so acceleration suffers and voltage sags under hard
| pulls. For grid storage, you're doing slow, steady
| charge/discharge cycles over hours, so the same battery that
| can't handle aggressive driving anymore works perfectly fine.
| Plus, grid storage has virtually unlimited space and no range
| anxiety, so if you need 25% more packs to hit your capacity
| target, you just stack them in a warehouse where real estate is
| cheap.
| miahi wrote:
| Also, batteries will degrade faster over time when they start
| to degrade, because they need more frequent charging. Their
| internal resistance increase and that promotes heat buildup
| during fast charging/discharging, another thing that promotes
| degradation. Slow charge/discharge cycles also help with heat
| management.
| ramses0 wrote:
| Looking forward to the grid-scale warehouse fire of battery
| packs popping off...
| dylan604 wrote:
| They claim to have taken the Moss Landing fire into account
| with how they are placing their batteries. We won't know if
| they've really solved the problem or not until their first
| battery pack experiences a runaway thermal event.
| hinkley wrote:
| > For grid storage, you're doing slow, steady
| charge/discharge cycles over hours.
|
| Only if the feed in is a bottleneck. For peak shaving you
| could go faster.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > Can "second life" EV batteries work as grid-scale energy
| storage?
|
| Yes
|
| is it profitable? probably not.
|
| Looking at the price for brid battery storage, and its dropping
| precipitously. The cost isn't as much in the batteries them
| selves, it packaging, placing and then controlling them.
|
| For example if you want to have a 200Mwhr 100Mw storage site,
| you'll need to place it, join it to the grid, all doable. Then
| you need the switch gear to make it work as you want it to.
|
| For day ahead, 30 minute trading, thats fairly simple.
|
| For grid stabilisation, thats a bit harder, you need to be able
| to lead/match/lag the grid frequency by n degrees
| instantaneously. which is trivial at a few kw, much harder at
| 100Mw
| nop_slide wrote:
| Sounds like what https://www.basepowercompany.com/ is doing
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Betteridge's law of headlines finally fails? TL;DR: Yes, but you
| can also make it 'not work' if you choose to politicize the tech
| solution to the energy problem.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Seems like the market is going the hybrid route. It's kind of
| easy to see why, best of both worlds. Some BYD hybrids have crazy
| ranges like 1500 km on a tank of gas. The more practical car is
| winning. They put in a much small battery in these for fast
| charge, and the daily commute range. And you have gas, for longer
| trips. Maybe smaller batteries would be better for grid-scale
| storage too. If they're lighter and easier to handle.
| pinkgolem wrote:
| i have heard that hybrid's have a maintanance problem?
|
| is not a concern, double the technologie in the same space?
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Not sure about that, since I did never owned one either. But
| I watched a review BYD car yesterday. And it's supper nice.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6bqgR3NRHE&t=1s
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| It's possible it might actually be more reliable long term,
| once the technology matures. For example, in cold weather the
| gas engine might heat the battery for better battery
| performance, maybe even extend its life if it prevents it
| from being drawn down too much. The gas engine, would also
| likely last longer since its not used for daily commutes.
|
| "In many PHEV systems, there are different modes:
|
| Electric mode (EV mode): The vehicle runs purely on the
| electric motor(s) and battery until the battery depletes to
| some extent.
|
| Hybrid/Parallel mode: Both the petrol engine and electric
| motor(s) work together to drive the wheels, especially under
| high load, higher speeds or when battery is low. Ithy
|
| Series mode (in some designs): The petrol engine acts only as
| a generator to charge the battery or power the electric
| motor(s), and the wheels are driven by the electric motor(s).
|
| For the BYD Leopard 5 (and many BYD PHEVs) the petrol engine
| can drive the wheels (i.e., it is not purely a generator). It
| is part of the drive system, especially when high power or
| long range is needed.
|
| At the same time, it likely can assist with charging the
| battery or maintaining battery state of charge (SOC) when
| needed (for example, to keep the battery at some reserve
| level or in "save" mode). User-reports show that the petrol
| engine will kick in to support the electric system, charge
| the battery, or assist the drive under certain conditions" -
| toast0 wrote:
| Eh, my PHEV has a 2 year oil change interval, which is longer
| than my ICE only cars. You should probably bring in your EV
| every 2 years to get things looked at too.
|
| The engine in a hybrid should live an easier life compared to
| an ICE. No extended idle, mostly running in the power band,
| etc. There are lots of different ways to setup the hybrid
| system, but typically, rather than a small stater motor, you
| have a larger motor/generator that also starts the engine;
| it's less likely to get worn out, because it's built for
| continuous use.
|
| In my PHEV, it has a 'toyota synergy' style 'e-CVT' which
| eliminates gear selection and should be very low maintenance
| (although mine had to be replaced under a service bulletin
| due to bearing failure because of manufacturing error) again
| nicer than an ICE. But some hybrids have a more traditional
| transmission.
|
| Certainly, you can do ICE only or EV only, but there's a lot
| of room to use the ICE for things it's good for, and the EV
| for things it's good for, and blend where there's overlap.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Not that I'm aware of. I've heard that many hybrids actually
| require less maintenance - for instance, the car can use
| electric power for hard acceleration instead of stressing the
| engine, so oil tends to last longer, and regenerative braking
| causes the friction brakes to wear out more slowly.
| numpad0 wrote:
| It's not like reliable gas cars ever had substantial
| maintenance problem in the gas part. So removing the gas part
| didn't do much in practice.
|
| People do/did have frustrations with gas car mannerisms and
| mental approachability, like, everything was written in a mix
| of translated foreign language documents and borderline
| insane gearhead languages. That lead them to imagine that
| removing the gas part would drastically change the industry,
| in their favor.
|
| But, in the end, gas cars are good with regular maintenance
| for something like 100k miles over 8 years, so, I wouldn't
| know what consumer product were more reliable than a gas car
| in the first place.
| iwanttocomment wrote:
| I've got a 13 year old EV and nobody has told me how to cash my
| EV in for reusable energy storage. (No, seriously, hit me up.)
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Just sell it though normal channels. If your battery is with
| more than your car then there would be people making money on
| the arbitrage.
| iwanttocomment wrote:
| I totally get that, but as the owner, perhaps _I 'd_ like to
| make the money on the battery before the arbitragers.
| torginus wrote:
| Personally speaking, having just bought an Ioniq 5 and installing
| solar at home what I see as the near future improvement is adding
| V2L functionality, which I can hook up to the generator input of
| my solar inverter, essentially adding another 60kWh buffer to my
| grid storage.
|
| Considering how expensive residential batteries are and how
| quickly EVs depreciate, I think soon it'll be cheaper to get a
| used EV as a cheap source of cells that accidentally happens to
| be able to drive itself around.
|
| Imo V2G, and V2H is unnecessary and add too much complication, I
| think for the future, solar inverters already have the necessary
| hardware and certifications to be able to take power and safely
| connect to the grid - something that requires different hardware
| and standards compliance in basically every country (yes even
| within the EU).
| irons wrote:
| In the US, V2L limits your ability to output power from the car
| to about 1500 W. It's not going to power your house as more
| than a stopgap, even if you do have supplementary house
| batteries. V2H/V2G justify their complexity by solving that
| problem, along with all the ancillary grid benefits.
| torginus wrote:
| Not sure if that's the case - however doing V2L requires the
| manufacturer to add an inverter to the car, and making that
| powerful probably adds extra cost most customers wouldn't
| pay. TI just looked it up and my Ioniq can only do about 2kW
| sustained - but since this charges the house battery, that's
| enough - idle load is just a couple hundred watts.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| A typical house averages less than 1500W. And most of the
| higher usage overlaps the sun being out. So if you have
| supplemental house batteries to handle bursts then 1500W of
| V2L can go a very long way.
| kieranmaine wrote:
| Very interesting - I did not know this was possible. A few
| questions:
|
| 1. Does the solar inverter do away with the need for a V2G or
| V2H unit?
|
| 2. What are the limitations vs a dedicated V2G/H unit?
|
| 3. Is generator input on your solar inverter a common feature
| across inverters?
| torginus wrote:
| 1. It does. The only issue is that the car can only output
| about 2kW sustained (this is a model limitation). That's fine
| since I have batteries in the house.
|
| 2. Tbh not super familiar with V2G/V2H, other than it being
| super expensive for both the wall box and the car (only high
| end models tend to support it)/
|
| 3. No idea, but it's not a high end feature, I wouldn't count
| on any inverter to just have it, but if you're looking to buy
| one that does, I don't think you'll be breaking the bank.
|
| Imo the future is for solar inverters to offer a dedicated DC
| car charger port, as once again all the hardware is already
| in there.
| kieranmaine wrote:
| Thanks for the answers. I used to work for a EV smart
| charging company (Kaluza) that ran a V2G trial. V2G was
| financial success for the users, but I always thought the
| wall box was a potential blocker. I don't think the 2kW
| output is a big issue as the customer could still reduce
| there load when required, but the elimination of a wall box
| makes onboarding much easier.
|
| As long as the inverter can also provide charging this
| definitely has some potential.
| archi42 wrote:
| Residential batteries are not that expensive anymore, at least
| not all of them. That's a misconception I also held until a few
| years ago ;-)
|
| My first 14.3 kWh pack cost about 2800$ DDP from China,
| delivered 03/2023. For that one I did calculate how long it
| took for amortization, which I projected at about 5 years.
|
| The second, identical pack was delivered 08/2024 and cost 2000$
| DDP. Since we got an EV that's drawing about 14kWh per day, I
| didn't bother doing the math and just ordered it.
|
| These are 280Ah 16S 51.6V packs, based on the EVE LF280K. In an
| enclosure, with a BMS (Seplos, 200A) and a dedicated balancer.
| They are good for 6000 cycles at 140A or less [each]. Mind
| these were both part of small bulk orders - I think each time
| we ordered 6 to 8 of these, which reduced shipping costs.
| torginus wrote:
| My new batteries were about 250EUR/kWh - my 10KWh unit cost
| 2500 EUR - scaling it up to a decent used 5 year old EV price
| - you can have one for 15k with 60+ kWh batteries, so I'd say
| it's at a very similar price.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| This is great! Now I have a place to take my old puffy Li-Ion
| batteries.
|
| https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/recycle-with-us/
| almosthere wrote:
| We don't need ev batteries for this. We just need cheap enough
| LifePo4 so we're not burning more shit down. Prismatics from
| China are a start, Salt batteries showing some promise next.
| tedk-42 wrote:
| > but what if they could drain every last drop of energy from
| those batteries before recycling them?
|
| Again batteries are an energy store and not an energy source. The
| fact the author cannot distinguish that makes the their opinion
| less credible.
| hinkley wrote:
| All I can think is embodied energy? That's weird.
| Lucian6 wrote:
| Having worked extensively with battery systems, I think the grid
| storage potential of second-life EV batteries is more complex
| than it appears. We found that typical EV batteries retain 70-80%
| capacity after 8-10 years of vehicle use, but the real challenge
| is standardization and integration. Different manufacturers use
| vastly different battery management systems (BMS) and cell
| configurations - a Tesla pack is fundamentally different from a
| Nissan Leaf pack.
|
| The economics are interesting though. New grid storage batteries
| cost around $200-300/kWh, while second-life EV batteries can be
| acquired for $50-100/kWh. However, you need to factor in
| significant integration costs (~$50-75/kWh) to build compatible
| BMS systems and thermal management. We also found cycle life
| degrades about 20% faster in repurposed packs compared to new
| ones, likely due to accumulated stress patterns from automotive
| use.
|
| Has anyone here successfully integrated mixed second-life
| batteries at scale? I'm particularly curious about how you
| handled thermal management across different pack designs while
| maintaining safe operating parameters.
| kibitzor wrote:
| >So top of the list for us, of course, designing this thing is
| safety.
|
| Funny issue I learned after talking to a founder at a similar
| company: although the battery packs were certified safe for cars
| (passing crash tests, wild heat differences from AK to AZ, people
| sitting on top of the battery packs in the car) ... the founder
| had issues re-certifying the batteries for safe use in a static
| location for grid storage.
|
| The certification process treated his company like the batteries
| were made from scratch even though they used the same BMS/coolant
| lines/etc. already proven and tested.
|
| It's clear you still need strong safety regulations and practices
| in the rare case there's an event, but the founder noted the grid
| storage industry regulations were adding redundant safety testing
| and slowing down adoption. The founder also added it's difficult
| to compete on cost even with effectively free used EV batteries
| in this startup space of grid storage against the low cost of
| Chinese made grid-specific batteries due to the added testing +
| custom hardware + space constraints and other items. (Caveat: I
| didn't fact check any of their statements)
| HocusLocus wrote:
| In an ice storm and cold cloudy snap that sweeps the country, NO
| lithium batteries will save the grid. I'm weary of this tunnel
| vision of the absurd. The only 'storage' that works is to pump
| water uphill with 'surplus' energy, and there is not and never
| will be a surplus. And these evaporartion tanks are on a scale
| that ecologists have to remember countless horror stories (eg.,
| Glenn Canyon Dam). And of course there's always "mfft!" (another
| scheme with no numbers behind it so it's credible because I'm
| talking about it).
|
| The last time there was anything rational on the table was Perry
| under the Trump administration's 30-day rule proposal (
| https://www.nucnet.org/news/nuclear-is-vital-to-us-national-...
| ). It gave a hard industry incentive to any supplier who can have
| 30 days' fuel on site. This means nuclear and coal. This was no
| gimmick, it was the first time anyone faced reality about
| National Security as related to Energy for the grid and survival.
| And now AI datacenter yadda yadda, we're also talking about the
| _luxury_ of keeping schools heated in Winter. Adverse weather
| even for a week is grid down game over for wind and solar. Proven
| natural gas are ~300 years, joy! As soon as they get around to
| sending pregnant whales across the ocean (losing ~20% of the gas-
| energy in cooling) it may even last 50 years! Before we have to
| go to endless war again.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I think car cells will be much more useful if they are packaged
| as replacement batteries for all the various battery powered
| tools, ebikes, etc.
|
| There's a consumer profit margin to absorb the repackaging and
| teardown.
|
| Maybe for home grid batteries they'll work too. Again, a consumer
| margin.
|
| Sodium Ion and other grid-specific storage will simply be too
| cheap for secondhand EV batteries to compete. And the retiring
| cells won't be any better in density and will be less safe than
| the higher density sodium ion and LFP that is hitting the market.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-23 23:00 UTC)