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Sodium Carbon batteries look like they are going to take over. When this happens, reusing will sell a little silly, cos of the high likelihood that recycling will be much easier. I don't think this tsunami will last very long:) Ride the Tsunami - metal band:)
I think that's great. A friend recommended this idea for personal/home use, but the catch is where to buy/find reliable used batteries. He works with car EV batteries, but not in retail and so does not know this, do you?
I was fairly certain you had covered this before, or maybe it was someone else. Either way, the drop that dead EV batteries aren’t dead, just no longer suitable for being EV batteries, was no surprise at all.
Two questions. When can we expect your album debut. Secondly, with BTU providing a resting place for Honda and Nissan batteries, you'd expect those manufacturers to work hand in hand with BTU as it significantly reduces their e-waste footprint. At least for a few more years.
Manufacturers could do a lot to help make this happen by building a basic standard BMS protocol into their packs. Should probably be mandated to do this.
While that would be ideal, in practicality it would hardly be feasible. However, there is definitely room in the market for creating a basic template that makes it easier for startups and existing companies to adopt this standard by nature of it being cheaper than them investing into their own production. Thus far most of the big players keep their stuff proprietary and don't share amongst each other, which is why I'd assume this hasn't really happened yet at a large global scale.
...also integrate peaker plants into the railway system for efficient transport and handling. As the railway system becomes electrified, they have a vested interest in supporting this upcoming infrastructure.
An then here is Tesla. They glue there battery to the chassis. It's so bad that you can not take the battery out and reuse it. There is a big need for legislation that forces OEM to allow standard connection and replaceable batteries
The standards tend to be formed by the number one players. A good example of this is, just this past week Ford and Tesla publicly announced their collaboration on Ford accepting the Tesla plug standard.
I think this is a great idea. This could be implamented as a virtual power plant. I live in a rural area and could see these being spread-out over farms. Get farm could have a couple of them. It wouldn't require a huge infrastruce or grid upgrade.
This is exactly what battery 🔋 manufacturers want, so when the dendrites grow, they burst into flames 🔥 in rural areas, the lithium waste can not be tracked back to them [since lithium waste is being linked to Autism in latest scientific studies], and the burden of recycling goes away.
Not so fast with that. Forklifts are heavy as are the battery packs. The land would likely have to be compacted for the structure and the access lanes. I do like the idea of distributed facilities but there are economies of scale to consider. Would local authorities require every storage facility to have someone on site 24/7 to monitor it?
Hi Matt, I've watched most, if not all, of your videos and this is perhaps the most impactful from a "let's put this to use today..." perspective. Thanks for the research and effort to put these together.
This is an excellent example of forward thinking on reuse. In the past, we let waste pile up for decades, even centuries, before developing effective long-life reuse for various industrial and consumer items and their waste products. It is also an excellent business model - finding a less expensive, safe and reliable solution for a large and costly problem.
i built my own setup with used tesla batteries ($1k/ea) and used high efficiency panels ($100/ea) coming out of a solar farm routine replacement 4yrs ago. the panels still produce more than rated output and the tesla batteries are working perfectly. i am probably going to add 4 more batteries (20kw) as their price has come way down.
Did you do a you tube or any kind of DIY on that setup? I have taken 2 battery packs from junked Toyota Prius’s and want to get more of them to build a battery backup system for my home and find some cheap solar panels as you have. I would like to use as much of the equipment from the sleds of Prius batteries as possible to repurpose as much as possible. Let me know if at all possible the details of your setup and any issues you encountered along the way. Thanks in advance.
As long as it can store energy from peak generation long enough to contribute during peak consumption it is viable on any scale. For wind that might be longer than solar, but if it works it works. Viability might trickle down to the level of your own power wall but that is still viability.
This feels like the perfect kind of solution for small scale towns far away from bigger cities. Like with some of the other innovations around something like solar panels with growing/ herding livestock underneath you could tether 20 farms with battery solutions like this to have consistent power. And enough of these tap into grid. You could change the economics of the overall grid. I actually got this video in my feed because I watched a video of a man that took an old Nissan leaf battery and used it for a shed. This is a much upgraded version but the idea is very similar.
Hi Matt! FYI, recycling now has 5 R's. The classic 3 as you've stated, reduce, reuse, recycle, and now the 2 new being refuse and repurpose. In the context of this video, repurposing is key! Great content as always! Thanks!
Looking forward to this system rolling out across the world. Personally, I wish we were less focussed on disposable design in EV installations. This idea will undoubtedly help
I've never been a fan of Big Utilities with centralized generation and distribution points. The advent of relatively energy dense batteries seem, to me, to be the perfect solution to individualized energy collection, storage and usage not unlike the Tesla model wherein homeowners with Tesla Power Walls have opted into their energy re-distribution plan. I'm surprised that someone has not already copied the Tesla model using these recyclable batteries in lieu of the Tesla battery packs. BTW, the BougeRV flexible solar panel seems like a real winner. I, normally, click past the commercials but I found this one truly fascinating since I own an RV that already has to of the first generation solar panels installed on it. Depending upon the performance of these flexible panels I may give serious consideration to replacing my old panels with an array of these newer ones.
Pollution comes from many different sources, and the solution will come from many sources. Good to see innovation at work. At this party, everyone with a solution is welcome. We are finally going in the right direction, so just keep going!
Reuse is better than recycling. I'd like to see this strategy everywhere but I don't think there be enough cars old enough to supply them until 2035 or later
There is a whole society of DIY battery recyclers salvaging and making new and various things with used EV battery packs and cells. Jehu Garcia (UA-camr, Businessman, Entrepreneur) is a renowned leader in this field.
To me the most interesting thing is the modularity of the system design. The plug and play setup is much like a RAID Array in a server... If a unit goes out, simply spin it down and hotswap it without interrupting everything. Tesla Megapacks can't do that - each cluster has to be taken offline to service any part of it.
Of course drive failures are relatively sudden while battery performance degrades over time. The key to making it work would be to put as much of the load as possible on the weakest batteries so that they degrade the fastest. Then the overall performance is stable as you swap out the unusable batteries at the bottom for new (recently retired) ones at the top.
Exactly, on both points. 👍 And expanding on the "hot spares", that could easily double as load testing prior to putting a unit online in the first place. It would definitely mitigate the chance of unexpected failures.
Hi Matt, thanks again for another great video. Like you, I am interested to see where this is all heading. I became recently excited about Hydrogen Powerpaste. I hope, that are going to make a video about it, because I really like to hear your thoughts about the technology. Keep up the good work. Cheers
I think used batteries from cars are the optimal source for home storage. But for Grid storage we should straight up to things like high temperature NaS Batteries.
Improving battery capacity and production is extremely important if we want to switch from fossil fuels (assuming fusion is a long ways off). Also, the metal band jokes were fun - a little corny but fun 😊
I'm at a company where we tried to do this very thing and those EV batteries don't work for this real well. Trying to figure out how to balance them and what your actual capacity is, given those EV batteries state of health are all over the place is a real PITA. Energy storage using new batteries is just way better and more cost effective. Recycling the old batteries is a better idea. But impressive how this company got these batteries to work.
hey matt, in my opinion, if you are using your script as the subtitle, its would be better if you recheck it again. as i need to enable the cc to understand whats you were saying. while majority of it is synched, the thing that i need/want to know is not in the subtitle..im writing this when i just watched first 50 seconds of this video. and this problem has been occurring for several past videos.. i would really appreciate if you would fix this problem. keep making great videos!
I plan a similar home scale solution. In a couple of years, I will add a bidirectional EV charger and bidirectional capable EV for V2H home backup to supplement my solar PV system. When the battery reaches end of life for transportation, it will become a stationary home backup battery, and driven only on short errands. No need to remove the old EV battery. Let that go for a decade, and voila!, I have a classic EV in the garage ready to sell to car collectors!😂 This solution isn't quite practical now because most EV's don't have bidirectional charging capability, but that's going to change soon.
Good Idea! How long can the batteries last in their new life as energy storage for the grid? After they can no longer be used as energy storage for the grid, do you not have the same issues and challenges of trying to recycle the batteries?
Depends on the chemistry. With nmc batteries that are mostly used in EVs at the moment, you get another 1000 cycles after 500 cycles in the car. LFP batteries could probably run 10000 cycles with slow loads/unloads. But there is also calendar aging. At some point it makes more sense to replace than to keep.
Wait .. did he just say it's not a huge problem of the huge power draw during the day in California bc it's covered by renewable energy? Have he not read the news of rolling black out through out California? Rolling black out happens so much it's the norm ..
Well, it an start. I never thought we could use old recycle lithium batteries on land for Solar plants. We need ones that are 75 MW or greater for this to work. It sounds like a cleaver system too.
This was an enjoyable video. However I think you may have underplayed the reduction element of reduce, reuse, recycle. At the moment car infrastructure isn't an efficient way to move people (other than when people are really in the middle of nowhere ) and we know people living more densely have a lower carbon footprint. I think dismissing a reduction in car usage and greater biking, walking and public transport as an option for reducing our climate foot print is hence shortsighted and something we can work on now even if battery capacity is a bottleneck for some people to transition to evs.
I wonder if there might be a smaller version for powering a home? Anything that provides cheaper home storage would surely find a market. Me, for starters.
Would be nice to line the sides of roads with native plant seeds of bushes flowers succulents cactus and trees to reduce heat wind and noise pollution. Also doing this will reduce energy demand and it will provide homes for wild life and o2 as well. Also cities need a new insulation standard r40 maybe r50 on 1 story homes and not r15 to r20 like we do now. Why do that well it will reduce energy consumption and if they make it where if you renovated anything in that home insulation needs updating. These 2 things can happen now and have almost Immediately.
Hey Matt, Really interesting video though it got me thinking about a related issue I was looking at the other day - Why are (at least here in the UK) residential solar PV storage batteries so much MORE expensive (per kWh) than those used in EV’s ? For example the cost of a Tesla PowerWall battery, compared to the ones Tesla use in their own EV’s. They answer I came across, time after time, was claiming that it’s because the home solar PV storage batteries are designed to cope with “more demanding” usage than those in EV’s - which TBH I thought didn’t sound right on face value. So to now hear that EV batteries which are no longer performing well enough for their original purpose can still have a useful 2nd life for solar PV storage makes me question this common excuse given for the ridiculously higher price per kWh we still have to pay for new batteries for home solar PV storage and whether there’s merit in buying used EV batteries to supplement your existing home solar PV battery storage? Would value your views on this - for example, is it a question of needing a lot of 2nd life EV batteries and hence storage space that would be an issue? My SunSynk 8kW Hybrid Inverter will happily work with batteries down to 20% capacity, provided their BMS is working properly - so if EV batteries are retired once they can only hold 70-80% …
I like the idea but I am still concerned with the cradle to grave impact on the environment since we are comparing it to fossil fuels. From whom do we buy the rare earth materials and minerals? In our political and reality environment, this matters. Thanks as always for your interesting videos.
For me the bottom line for systems like this is that they will take a hit once the supply of new batteries ramps to a level that matches demand. In a commercial environment most of the time the target is reliable consistent equipment. Depending on how hands on a system like this is the ongoing costs to constantly swap out defunct units will add up and the financial side which is the main driver for business will probably take over and look to reduce costs and max profit.
I wonder if burying them underground would help with the over heating issues. It is usually a hotter climate where solar is most useful, but even a little ways underground is much cooler and tends to stay that way. All in all I do like this idea. And the fact at least one business is already making a profit off this idea does a lot to prove viability.
I wnoder if you can propose the reasonable price of reuse-battery ESS regardless of high labor cost required to rebuild the ESS because it's quite difficult to refab it automatically.
why didn't they start with Tesla battery format - forward thinking - rather than the minimal supply of the ones they chose I wonder? Very soon there will be massive numbers of Tesla batteries, but perhaps what they chose is more available now?
Anyone noticed that sound queue Matt always adds at the end of his videos indicating that the video is about to end? From 11:11 to 11:14? It reminds me of Syfy movie but I forgot its name. Anyone?
Develop right now the "UNIVERSAL BATTERY CONNECCTHORR" to effortlessly plug a battery either in a car , in a house or in a power station. That would deal with the tsunami.
The economic competition to these large grid batteries will be the inevitable incorporation of households that use their cars to feed back to grid for a more favourable electricity tarif. That storage is local so negates most of the transmission losses too. Likewise, these used batteries would be better used for powerwalls, especially for off-grid.
I don't understand how feeding back to the grid is supposed to work (help). I suppose in the summer if people come home from work with batteries that are still partially charged they can be discharged then and charged later at night. But that doesn't work as well in the winter (peak demand in the morning), and in general I feel uncomfortable with discharging my car that is already low at the end of the day. As for reselling used car batteries for residential power storage, that seems hard if you're not sure what you're getting.
I'm doing a project based on this topic, can you provide some resources that would help me. My project is based on the economic viability of this kind of energy storage in UK
If automakers can make tiny tweaks to account for these second life uses and make them even easier to be transitioned for this, I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing automakers jump into the energy storage space to compete with BTU, or at least doing something to pad their bottom line. Honestly sounds like the only argument against EVs right now are those who need long distance capabilities, and hybrids have that covered well. Many families have two vehicles, the daily commuter and the larger family vehicle; getting to the point where it's hard to argue against the commuter being an EV.
This system truly relies on economies of scale to reduce waste and environmental damage (at least as designed). It accepts used products at random levels of wear and uses each for as much it can do, leveling out differences until each used product needs to be truly abandoned and sold for material recycling. On the electricity side it uses the gigantic averaging of millions of consumers and thousands of power sources done by the grid itself. Being fully stationary also removes the need to worry about kWh per ton consoderations needed for moving vehicles. As all such projects it will one day be accused of doing a few things wrong in a very harmful way, but this doesn't negate humanity's need to take the chance to stop the known massive damage done by too quickly extracting ever more resources that nature stashed away over millions of years.
It would have been cool with enough battery's and solar for my home, but then again it cost the same as what my electrity cost for the next 30 years :/ And i'm not planning on living in the same house for that long.
Matt - I love your channel but the whole purpose of UA-cam Premium is so I dont have to watch ads. If you're going to actually DO the ad yourself in a video, you should be timestamping it so that I can choose to skip it if I want.
ive seen people using old EV batteries for home storage and its cheaper and much much larger, but they all seem to totally tear them apart. is it not possible to come up with a plug and play solution for reuse an EV battery in a home system?
Letting software take care of different battery pack states live together is a more efficient approach. Once you have the software capability built, it will also allow for different packs from different OEMs also get used at the same facility. You just need enough “old battery” inventory to become available to make the software/hardware integration tweaks to be worth it.
@@ZeoCyberG My comment was on the pack, not individual cells. By simply running the pack through a few charge / discharge cycles in order to ascertain the pack's condition, they can be grouped together with other packs that have similar capabilities.
@@jojones9194 Again, it breaks down to the individual cells. The packs won't all perform the same over time. System needs to adapt over time for it to work. Especially, if you want a reliable power grid and reduce the chances of catastrophic failures. These aren't the safer LifePO4 batteries. So there's also safety concerns.
On the contrary, if the packs are all the same age, then the entire array degrades. If instead you put the most stress on the weakest batteries, that allows them to be completely used up and sent to recycling while new (recently retired) ones are swapped in, maintaining a stable overall performance for the array.
Major issue: you can’t get rid of the peaker plants until the alternatives are 100% reliable, which means not depending on solar and wind to charge them. It also means the cost of the peaker plants actually increases since they still need maintenance but gradually produce less and less energy to offset the costs. I believe nuclear is the only energy source that checks all boxes for the foreseeable future, but the “green” people refuse to entertain this, siting so much concern over risks that are, in the opinion of many, blown out of proportion.
Depends just how much storage you are able to put together. If you have enough battery capacity to run the entire state for a couple weeks, that seems like it would be sufficient, as it is extremely unlikely that you will have no sun and no wind, across the entire state, for two weeks straight. Especially in a place like California that has lots and lots of desert, where there is almost never (at least during the day) not sun. Of course, a few minutes or hours of storage won't cut for actually being able to shut down the peaker plants, but you've got to start somewhere. Of course, nuclear power is good too, but it shouldn't be and either/or. We need both.
@@ab-tf5fl enough battery capacity to run the entire state for a couple of weeks? We only have enough capacity to run the state for a couple of MINUTES right now. At the very least you’re thinking long term! 😁
@@londonyes1380 people also forget that small modular nuclear is near ready to roll out, and could have been much sooner if investments were made to accelerate development. Investment dollars are being steered in the wrong direction, chasing foolish government spending on unreliable energy.
"Reduce" is ALWAYS the first solution. Always! We need to reduce total private vehicles implementing much better urban design, more walkability, much better transit and cycling. Yes EVs will need to grow. But that's only a sustainable and desirable solution if ICE vehicles shrink even faster.
This issue of needing to rely on peaker plants as the sun goes down was also behind a recent study I saw urging public utilities to incentivize people to use at-work charging for their EVs during their work day rather than at-home, overnight charging, because they just created a new peak in demand from the traditional mid-day heat to end-day plugging in, and it didn't align with solar. The better solution is to not accept the limitations of solar and wind and do the sensible, nuclear thing.
Natural gas is most definitely worse thsn coal. Its typically methane, which as you know is a significantly more potent greenhouse gas. When its burned, sure its pretty clean, but it leaks out all the time and thats the problem.
It makes sense to put the battery where the power is generated. Wind and solar power generation is DC, so there's no loss to rectification (beyond what's built into the wind turbines already) and the inverters for transmission are already right there. Of course if these are panels on your house, then the storage should be on your house. And having the storage at the substation level would be nice; it would increase robustness and save transmission losses when the scarce resource of stored power is being used. But the logistics of siting the storage centrally is also worth considering.
What about when all those batteries are truly at their end of life? Then what are going to do with them all ? Are we just hoping that future development in recycling will have advanced to the point of cost effective efficiency and profitability by then? We have been down this road before, sort of, with nuclear powerplant waste. We were hoping for better, safer and cheaper storage solutions and they never came.
The customers of these batteries are the ones subsidising these batteries, the inflated costs they pay is more than enough overcome the money saved by this company
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Sodium Carbon batteries look like they are going to take over. When this happens, reusing will sell a little silly, cos of the high likelihood that recycling will be much easier. I don't think this tsunami will last very long:)
Ride the Tsunami - metal band:)
I think that's great. A friend recommended this idea for personal/home use, but the catch is where to buy/find reliable used batteries. He works with car EV batteries, but not in retail and so does not know this, do you?
@@MozartificeR Active carbon might get replace in the future with something like sulfur.
I was fairly certain you had covered this before, or maybe it was someone else. Either way, the drop that dead EV batteries aren’t dead, just no longer suitable for being EV batteries, was no surprise at all.
Two questions. When can we expect your album debut.
Secondly, with BTU providing a resting place for Honda and Nissan batteries, you'd expect those manufacturers to work hand in hand with BTU as it significantly reduces their e-waste footprint. At least for a few more years.
Manufacturers could do a lot to help make this happen by building a basic standard BMS protocol into their packs. Should probably be mandated to do this.
While that would be ideal, in practicality it would hardly be feasible. However, there is definitely room in the market for creating a basic template that makes it easier for startups and existing companies to adopt this standard by nature of it being cheaper than them investing into their own production. Thus far most of the big players keep their stuff proprietary and don't share amongst each other, which is why I'd assume this hasn't really happened yet at a large global scale.
Then used prices would probably double.
...also integrate peaker plants into the railway system for efficient transport and handling. As the railway system becomes electrified, they have a vested interest in supporting this upcoming infrastructure.
An then here is Tesla. They glue there battery to the chassis. It's so bad that you can not take the battery out and reuse it.
There is a big need for legislation that forces OEM to allow standard connection and replaceable batteries
The standards tend to be formed by the number one players. A good example of this is, just this past week Ford and Tesla publicly announced their collaboration on Ford accepting the Tesla plug standard.
You missed out on a great title "How dead EV batteries are the perfect vehicle for energy storage"
Oh ... my ... 🤯
@@UndecidedMFupdate video… title is done!
I think this is a great idea. This could be implamented as a virtual power plant. I live in a rural area and could see these being spread-out over farms. Get farm could have a couple of them. It wouldn't require a huge infrastruce or grid upgrade.
This is exactly what battery 🔋 manufacturers want, so when the dendrites grow, they burst into flames 🔥 in rural areas, the lithium waste can not be tracked back to them [since lithium waste is being linked to Autism in latest scientific studies], and the burden of recycling goes away.
Just local co-operation and micro-grid deployment.
Have you MET capitalist Amurikkka?
Not so fast with that. Forklifts are heavy as are the battery packs. The land would likely have to be compacted for the structure and the access lanes. I do like the idea of distributed facilities but there are economies of scale to consider. Would local authorities require every storage facility to have someone on site 24/7 to monitor it?
Hi Matt,
I've watched most, if not all, of your videos and this is perhaps the most impactful from a "let's put this to use today..." perspective. Thanks for the research and effort to put these together.
Matt has a seemingly infinite supply of Dad puns today.
This is an excellent example of forward thinking on reuse. In the past, we let waste pile up for decades, even centuries, before developing effective long-life reuse for various industrial and consumer items and their waste products. It is also an excellent business model - finding a less expensive, safe and reliable solution for a large and costly problem.
i built my own setup with used tesla batteries ($1k/ea) and used high efficiency panels ($100/ea) coming out of a solar farm routine replacement 4yrs ago. the panels still produce more than rated output and the tesla batteries are working perfectly. i am probably going to add 4 more batteries (20kw) as their price has come way down.
Did you do a you tube or any kind of DIY on that setup? I have taken 2 battery packs from junked Toyota Prius’s and want to get more of them to build a battery backup system for my home and find some cheap solar panels as you have. I would like to use as much of the equipment from the sleds of Prius batteries as possible to repurpose as much as possible. Let me know if at all possible the details of your setup and any issues you encountered along the way. Thanks in advance.
@@Monstur9 did you get my reply? i did this whole long reply and i just noticed it is not here!
I did similar things
Just checked out the latest Battery-pocolypse album and it absolutely slaps!!!
Don’t sound so shocked!
🤘
As long as it can store energy from peak generation long enough to contribute during peak consumption it is viable on any scale. For wind that might be longer than solar, but if it works it works. Viability might trickle down to the level of your own power wall but that is still viability.
Battery Flood isn't a bad one, because in some languages (like Spanish or Portuguese) drums are basically called battery as well.
This feels like the perfect kind of solution for small scale towns far away from bigger cities.
Like with some of the other innovations around something like solar panels with growing/ herding livestock underneath you could tether 20 farms with battery solutions like this to have consistent power. And enough of these tap into grid. You could change the economics of the overall grid.
I actually got this video in my feed because I watched a video of a man that took an old Nissan leaf battery and used it for a shed. This is a much upgraded version but the idea is very similar.
Reuse is the very best way to go with these things. 👍. Thanks for the vid..... Jim Bell (Australia)
I surely hope the politicians' staffers are subscribed and taking notes! Another excellent episode. Thank you.
Hi Matt! FYI, recycling now has 5 R's. The classic 3 as you've stated, reduce, reuse, recycle, and now the 2 new being refuse and repurpose. In the context of this video, repurposing is key!
Great content as always! Thanks!
THe battery flood band gag gave me a good laugh. Thanks 😆
I wonder if these sorts of secondary uses will force a greater degree of standardization on EV makers.
Looking forward to this system rolling out across the world.
Personally, I wish we were less focussed on disposable design in EV installations. This idea will undoubtedly help
Someone needs to come up with a similar solution for off grid home customers demands
I've never been a fan of Big Utilities with centralized generation and distribution points. The advent of relatively energy dense batteries seem, to me, to be the perfect solution to individualized energy collection, storage and usage not unlike the Tesla model wherein homeowners with Tesla Power Walls have opted into their energy re-distribution plan. I'm surprised that someone has not already copied the Tesla model using these recyclable batteries in lieu of the Tesla battery packs.
BTW, the BougeRV flexible solar panel seems like a real winner. I, normally, click past the commercials but I found this one truly fascinating since I own an RV that already has to of the first generation solar panels installed on it. Depending upon the performance of these flexible panels I may give serious consideration to replacing my old panels with an array of these newer ones.
Alternating the direct current. Pretty cool...
Pollution comes from many different sources, and the solution will come from many sources. Good to see innovation at work. At this party, everyone with a solution is welcome. We are finally going in the right direction, so just keep going!
Reuse is better than recycling. I'd like to see this strategy everywhere but I don't think there be enough cars old enough to supply them until 2035 or later
Some people are hard on their cars. There'll be enough to get this started and the supply will only increase.
Enjoyed dead battery episode and your references to heavy metal. Less info is best. Bravo
A sponsored ad that’s actually worth watching… imagine that.
Batt Ferrel / Ferrule is your "metal band".
There is a whole society of DIY battery recyclers salvaging and making new and various things with used EV battery packs and cells. Jehu Garcia (UA-camr, Businessman, Entrepreneur) is a renowned leader in this field.
If Matt is looking to name his new Metal Band, B2U sounds like a KPop Group.
To me the most interesting thing is the modularity of the system design. The plug and play setup is much like a RAID Array in a server... If a unit goes out, simply spin it down and hotswap it without interrupting everything. Tesla Megapacks can't do that - each cluster has to be taken offline to service any part of it.
Of course drive failures are relatively sudden while battery performance degrades over time.
The key to making it work would be to put as much of the load as possible on the weakest batteries so that they degrade the fastest.
Then the overall performance is stable as you swap out the unusable batteries at the bottom for new (recently retired) ones at the top.
Exactly, on both points. 👍
And expanding on the "hot spares", that could easily double as load testing prior to putting a unit online in the first place. It would definitely mitigate the chance of unexpected failures.
Just found this channel. Looks like a winner.
7:08 - "IT'S GONNA BLOWWWW...!!!"
Hi Matt, thanks again for another great video. Like you, I am interested to see where this is all heading. I became recently excited about Hydrogen Powerpaste. I hope, that are going to make a video about it, because I really like to hear your thoughts about the technology. Keep up the good work. Cheers
Looking forward to the band's first single, Acid Flooded
Thumbs up just for the metal band gags. 😂 but seriously thanks for this informative channel
I think used batteries from cars are the optimal source for home storage. But for Grid storage we should straight up to things like high temperature NaS Batteries.
Improving battery capacity and production is extremely important if we want to switch from fossil fuels (assuming fusion is a long ways off).
Also, the metal band jokes were fun - a little corny but fun 😊
Interesting flexible solar. Good to see after ATS attempt at it almost destroyed the company. I know people who worked there.
I'm at a company where we tried to do this very thing and those EV batteries don't work for this real well. Trying to figure out how to balance them and what your actual capacity is, given those EV batteries state of health are all over the place is a real PITA. Energy storage using new batteries is just way better and more cost effective. Recycling the old batteries is a better idea.
But impressive how this company got these batteries to work.
boot the intro song! dubstep was in like 2 decades ago! lol Much love from Rochester
hey matt, in my opinion, if you are using your script as the subtitle, its would be better if you recheck it again. as i need to enable the cc to understand whats you were saying. while majority of it is synched, the thing that i need/want to know is not in the subtitle..im writing this when i just watched first 50 seconds of this video. and this problem has been occurring for several past videos.. i would really appreciate if you would fix this problem. keep making great videos!
I saw on another Channel, a very clever man was using his old Nissan Leaf battery for home storage - Edit: Dalas EV Repair
👍
I plan a similar home scale solution. In a couple of years, I will add a bidirectional EV charger and bidirectional capable EV for V2H home backup to supplement my solar PV system. When the battery reaches end of life for transportation, it will become a stationary home backup battery, and driven only on short errands. No need to remove the old EV battery. Let that go for a decade, and voila!, I have a classic EV in the garage ready to sell to car collectors!😂 This solution isn't quite practical now because most EV's don't have bidirectional charging capability, but that's going to change soon.
It seems that it is already decided. and this is good.
Good Idea! How long can the batteries last in their new life as energy storage for the grid? After they can no longer be used as energy storage for the grid, do you not have the same issues and challenges of trying to recycle the batteries?
Depends on the chemistry. With nmc batteries that are mostly used in EVs at the moment, you get another 1000 cycles after 500 cycles in the car. LFP batteries could probably run 10000 cycles with slow loads/unloads. But there is also calendar aging. At some point it makes more sense to replace than to keep.
Wait .. did he just say it's not a huge problem of the huge power draw during the day in California bc it's covered by renewable energy?
Have he not read the news of rolling black out through out California? Rolling black out happens so much it's the norm ..
Well, it an start. I never thought we could use old recycle lithium batteries on land for Solar plants. We need ones that are 75 MW or greater for this to work. It sounds like a cleaver system too.
This was an enjoyable video. However I think you may have underplayed the reduction element of reduce, reuse, recycle. At the moment car infrastructure isn't an efficient way to move people (other than when people are really in the middle of nowhere ) and we know people living more densely have a lower carbon footprint. I think dismissing a reduction in car usage and greater biking, walking and public transport as an option for reducing our climate foot print is hence shortsighted and something we can work on now even if battery capacity is a bottleneck for some people to transition to evs.
I wonder if there might be a smaller version for powering a home? Anything that provides cheaper home storage would surely find a market. Me, for starters.
I wonder if he will make new UA-cam channels for Battery Flood , Battery Necromancer, Batterypocalypse, etc?
wow! I really enjoy this video, thx alot!
I did this a few years ago using 8 batteries from scrap Nissan vans and cars. I live in Scotland so our problems are all in winter.
its great! but its just delaying EOL for the batteries.. hopefully long enough so recycling can catch up.
Exactly
Would be nice to line the sides of roads with native plant seeds of bushes flowers succulents cactus and trees to reduce heat wind and noise pollution.
Also doing this will reduce energy demand and it will provide homes for wild life and o2 as well.
Also cities need a new insulation standard r40 maybe r50 on 1 story homes and not r15 to r20 like we do now.
Why do that well it will reduce energy consumption and if they make it where if you renovated anything in that home insulation needs updating.
These 2 things can happen now and have almost Immediately.
Hey Matt, Really interesting video though it got me thinking about a related issue I was looking at the other day - Why are (at least here in the UK) residential solar PV storage batteries so much MORE expensive (per kWh) than those used in EV’s ? For example the cost of a Tesla PowerWall battery, compared to the ones Tesla use in their own EV’s. They answer I came across, time after time, was claiming that it’s because the home solar PV storage batteries are designed to cope with “more demanding” usage than those in EV’s - which TBH I thought didn’t sound right on face value. So to now hear that EV batteries which are no longer performing well enough for their original purpose can still have a useful 2nd life for solar PV storage makes me question this common excuse given for the ridiculously higher price per kWh we still have to pay for new batteries for home solar PV storage and whether there’s merit in buying used EV batteries to supplement your existing home solar PV battery storage? Would value your views on this - for example, is it a question of needing a lot of 2nd life EV batteries and hence storage space that would be an issue? My SunSynk 8kW Hybrid Inverter will happily work with batteries down to 20% capacity, provided their BMS is working properly - so if EV batteries are retired once they can only hold 70-80% …
Great approach. Very innovative.
Bouge RV advertising stops at 4:58. you are welcome.
I still love how important today the plan of the villain from Batman Returns was
Stealing babies from Gotham’s elite and drowning them in the sewer?
@@frederickheard2022 the other villain :D
Band name! Called it!
I think "Battery Acid" is a catchier name for a metal band..just my opinion!
I like the idea but I am still concerned with the cradle to grave impact on the environment since we are comparing it to fossil fuels. From whom do we buy the rare earth materials and minerals? In our political and reality environment, this matters. Thanks as always for your interesting videos.
Nice idea and nice video
For me the bottom line for systems like this is that they will take a hit once the supply of new batteries ramps to a level that matches demand. In a commercial environment most of the time the target is reliable consistent equipment. Depending on how hands on a system like this is the ongoing costs to constantly swap out defunct units will add up and the financial side which is the main driver for business will probably take over and look to reduce costs and max profit.
Decentralised access to recycled car batteries would be great!
Seems like we need battery standards like USB standards, so that we can build one second use system to take any and all used car batteries.
It's like disposable vape batteries, only scaled up! 😉
this is a GREAT idea, we should be doing this in Australia. We have so much sun and land.. how do we reach out to contact B2u
I wonder if burying them underground would help with the over heating issues. It is usually a hotter climate where solar is most useful, but even a little ways underground is much cooler and tends to stay that way.
All in all I do like this idea. And the fact at least one business is already making a profit off this idea does a lot to prove viability.
I wnoder if you can propose the reasonable price of reuse-battery ESS regardless of high labor cost required to rebuild the ESS because it's quite difficult to refab it automatically.
I'd be interested in what you have to say about enervenue's nickel-hydrogen batteries
why didn't they start with Tesla battery format - forward thinking - rather than the minimal supply of the ones they chose I wonder? Very soon there will be massive numbers of Tesla batteries, but perhaps what they chose is more available now?
Thanks!
Thanks, David!
Shout out to Reelectrify who has been working on a similar technology for years. From I understand their BMS is cell level.
Anyone noticed that sound queue Matt always adds at the end of his videos indicating that the video is about to end? From 11:11 to 11:14? It reminds me of Syfy movie but I forgot its name. Anyone?
I want to know how much they pay for your used battery. If they assume they are given these for free it is not a real plan.
Develop right now the "UNIVERSAL BATTERY CONNECCTHORR" to effortlessly plug a battery either in a car , in a house or in a power station. That would deal with the tsunami.
There ARE also some safety concernS (plural)
Isn't that why it's out in the desert somewhere?
The economic competition to these large grid batteries will be the inevitable incorporation of households that use their cars to feed back to grid for a more favourable electricity tarif.
That storage is local so negates most of the transmission losses too.
Likewise, these used batteries would be better used for powerwalls, especially for off-grid.
I don't understand how feeding back to the grid is supposed to work (help).
I suppose in the summer if people come home from work with batteries that are still partially charged they can be discharged then and charged later at night.
But that doesn't work as well in the winter (peak demand in the morning), and in general I feel uncomfortable with discharging my car that is already low at the end of the day.
As for reselling used car batteries for residential power storage, that seems hard if you're not sure what you're getting.
I'm doing a project based on this topic, can you provide some resources that would help me. My project is based on the economic viability of this kind of energy storage in UK
you need to tel the details of the sponsored video in the discr.
Can I please join your next metal band? The two things I love the most are brutal guitar riffs and taking my rubbish home with me.
🤘let's rock!
If automakers can make tiny tweaks to account for these second life uses and make them even easier to be transitioned for this, I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing automakers jump into the energy storage space to compete with BTU, or at least doing something to pad their bottom line.
Honestly sounds like the only argument against EVs right now are those who need long distance capabilities, and hybrids have that covered well. Many families have two vehicles, the daily commuter and the larger family vehicle; getting to the point where it's hard to argue against the commuter being an EV.
This system truly relies on economies of scale to reduce waste and environmental damage (at least as designed). It accepts used products at random levels of wear and uses each for as much it can do, leveling out differences until each used product needs to be truly abandoned and sold for material recycling. On the electricity side it uses the gigantic averaging of millions of consumers and thousands of power sources done by the grid itself. Being fully stationary also removes the need to worry about kWh per ton consoderations needed for moving vehicles.
As all such projects it will one day be accused of doing a few things wrong in a very harmful way, but this doesn't negate humanity's need to take the chance to stop the known massive damage done by too quickly extracting ever more resources that nature stashed away over millions of years.
It would have been cool with enough battery's and solar for my home, but then again it cost the same as what my electrity cost for the next 30 years :/ And i'm not planning on living in the same house for that long.
Matt - I love your channel but the whole purpose of UA-cam Premium is so I dont have to watch ads. If you're going to actually DO the ad yourself in a video, you should be timestamping it so that I can choose to skip it if I want.
ive seen people using old EV batteries for home storage and its cheaper and much much larger, but they all seem to totally tear them apart. is it not possible to come up with a plug and play solution for reuse an EV battery in a home system?
I am surprised that the battery packs aren't paired with other battery packs that have the same "life" left in them.
Letting software take care of different battery pack states live together is a more efficient approach. Once you have the software capability built, it will also allow for different packs from different OEMs also get used at the same facility. You just need enough “old battery” inventory to become available to make the software/hardware integration tweaks to be worth it.
Battery cells don't all wear equally and the more the battery degrades the more differences will pop up...
@@ZeoCyberG My comment was on the pack, not individual cells. By simply running the pack through a few charge / discharge cycles in order to ascertain the pack's condition, they can be grouped together with other packs that have similar capabilities.
@@jojones9194 Again, it breaks down to the individual cells. The packs won't all perform the same over time. System needs to adapt over time for it to work. Especially, if you want a reliable power grid and reduce the chances of catastrophic failures. These aren't the safer LifePO4 batteries. So there's also safety concerns.
On the contrary, if the packs are all the same age, then the entire array degrades.
If instead you put the most stress on the weakest batteries, that allows them to be completely used up and sent to recycling while new (recently retired) ones are swapped in, maintaining a stable overall performance for the array.
I wanna hear Matt do a death growl.
😂
It sounds like you’re saying BTU. It’s B2U, right?
Could be used for domestic use too.
?
Major issue: you can’t get rid of the peaker plants until the alternatives are 100% reliable, which means not depending on solar and wind to charge them. It also means the cost of the peaker plants actually increases since they still need maintenance but gradually produce less and less energy to offset the costs.
I believe nuclear is the only energy source that checks all boxes for the foreseeable future, but the “green” people refuse to entertain this, siting so much concern over risks that are, in the opinion of many, blown out of proportion.
Depends just how much storage you are able to put together. If you have enough battery capacity to run the entire state for a couple weeks, that seems like it would be sufficient, as it is extremely unlikely that you will have no sun and no wind, across the entire state, for two weeks straight. Especially in a place like California that has lots and lots of desert, where there is almost never (at least during the day) not sun.
Of course, a few minutes or hours of storage won't cut for actually being able to shut down the peaker plants, but you've got to start somewhere.
Of course, nuclear power is good too, but it shouldn't be and either/or. We need both.
@@ab-tf5fl enough battery capacity to run the entire state for a couple of weeks? We only have enough capacity to run the state for a couple of MINUTES right now. At the very least you’re thinking long term! 😁
People forget that nuclear power is prohibitively expensive and takes near decades to build.
@@londonyes1380 people also forget that small modular nuclear is near ready to roll out, and could have been much sooner if investments were made to accelerate development. Investment dollars are being steered in the wrong direction, chasing foolish government spending on unreliable energy.
@@superspeeder yes and those plants would also be ridiculously expensive.
"Reduce" is ALWAYS the first solution. Always! We need to reduce total private vehicles implementing much better urban design, more walkability, much better transit and cycling. Yes EVs will need to grow. But that's only a sustainable and desirable solution if ICE vehicles shrink even faster.
This issue of needing to rely on peaker plants as the sun goes down was also behind a recent study I saw urging public utilities to incentivize people to use at-work charging for their EVs during their work day rather than at-home, overnight charging, because they just created a new peak in demand from the traditional mid-day heat to end-day plugging in, and it didn't align with solar. The better solution is to not accept the limitations of solar and wind and do the sensible, nuclear thing.
Natural gas is most definitely worse thsn coal. Its typically methane, which as you know is a significantly more potent greenhouse gas.
When its burned, sure its pretty clean, but it leaks out all the time and thats the problem.
Theres still the problem of power transmission- distance matters. might be better to do this on a house or housing develpment level.
It makes sense to put the battery where the power is generated.
Wind and solar power generation is DC, so there's no loss to rectification (beyond what's built into the wind turbines already) and the inverters for transmission are already right there.
Of course if these are panels on your house, then the storage should be on your house.
And having the storage at the substation level would be nice; it would increase robustness and save transmission losses when the scarce resource of stored power is being used.
But the logistics of siting the storage centrally is also worth considering.
What about when all those batteries are truly at their end of life? Then what are going to do with them all ? Are we just hoping that future development in recycling will have advanced to the point of cost effective efficiency and profitability by then? We have been down this road before, sort of, with nuclear powerplant waste. We were hoping for better, safer and cheaper storage solutions and they never came.
Good idea lets use used EV batteries. What could go wrong?
Killer sponsor!
The customers of these batteries are the ones subsidising these batteries, the inflated costs they pay is more than enough overcome the money saved by this company
If this could get scaled down to home use where a customer could install 2 or 4 instead of a power wall I think this would be a huge benefit.
Generators converted to HHO would fix night charging.