Assuming that most of the UK vehicle parc of some 30 million cars, vans and motorcycles goes electric by say 2040, what will we do with the battery packs which don’t hold their charge? It’s a serious question, as car and van battery packs cannot be stored easily and pose a fire risk if left unattended. On top of that battery packs are sometimes difficult to extract from damaged, or written-off cars. One science website reports that it takes 2 hours to remove a battery pack from a Nissan Leaf.
Recovering the rare metals inside battery pack cells is time consuming, hazardous to humans and the environment, plus it costs lots of money. One alternative to dismantling battery packs, cell by cell, is reusing them as back-up arrays, which provide a few minutes of reserve power to a National or Local Grid, during an outage, or heavy baseload. It takes a vast amount of money spent for just minutes of power sometimes, one project in Scotland has a budget of £235 million. But it is a form of recycling.
The battery array concept cannot take care of the millions of dead car batteries that will be lying around by 2030, but it can provide a second life for some spent car batteries.
Some work is already being done in the UK. One array is operational in Brentwood, (built by JP Containers below) acting as back-up units for power demand surges. These typically occur on dead calm winter days, when solar and wind power are virtually useless at 6pm-8pm when everyone wants to cook, watch TV and switch on their home heating systems.
Whether or not the array tech actually delivers reliable power is a side note for insurers. What it does create is expensive commercical infrastructure, which carries a major fire hazard, that needs to be insured. This means high premiums, long term, as both taxpayers cash and pensions funds are funnelled into various alternatives to building nuclear power stations, which voters don’t like. Battery arrays offer a mix of high risks, with potentially healthy profits for insurers if the risk is correctly priced. It also ticks the ESG/Net Zero box, so it’s win-win.
Here’s the word from Japan as Jera put some cash into the same array idea;
JERA Co., Inc. (JERA) announces the launch today of a demonstration project aimed at establishing operation of a large-scale energy storage system that reuses electric vehicle drive batteries and is capable of being connected to the extra-high-voltage transmission grid.
This project has been approved under the Ministry of the Environment’s Fiscal 2023 Demonstration Projects for Total Optimization of Renewable Energy-Related Products and Base Materials Aimed at Establishing a Domestic Resource Circulation System grant program and will be conducted with technical support from Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota).
Together with Toyota, JERA has constructed a large-capacity sweep energy storage system that reuses drive batteries from electric vehicles and operated it connected to the power distribution system. The current demonstration project will advance technology development aimed at establishing operation of a larger-scale energy storage system that, in a world’s first, can be connected to the extra-high-voltage transmission grid.
As we transition to an age of EVs, large numbers of used lithium-ion and other vehicle batteries are expected to be generated going forward. We believe that using the current demonstration project to establish technologies that enable such used batteries to be utilized at scale will contribute to promoting their domestic reuse. Furthermore, we will apply the operational data gained from the large-scale energy storage system to advance the development of technologies that reduce CO2 emissions over the lifecycle of vehicle batteries and improve the safety and reliability of used batteries.
Going forward, JERA will continue collaborating with leading companies from Japan and overseas, both within the energy industry and beyond, to develop technologies like energy storage systems and services that contribute to optimal energy utilization as we proactively seek to achieve decarbonization and resource circulation across society.
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