Lithium-ion batteries have led the mobile digital revolution, not to mention the electric vehicle boom, but they’re just more dead weight without proper recycling. Giving them productive life after death has been an ongoing research concern, especially for the burgeoning electric vehicle market, and the data is looking up.
Norman Mineta‘s National Transit Research Consortium (MNTRA) teamed up with Michigan’s Department of Transportation and Sybesma Electronics to crunch that data and found lithium-ion batteries to be “an efficient energy storage mechanism” whose “use in vehicles is increasing to support electrification to meet increasing average mileage and decreasing greenhouse gas emission standards.” Their joint report — Remanufacturing, Repurposing, and Recycling of Post-Vehicle-Application Use of Lithium-Ion Batteries ( — uses a bit more jargon than recycling, but its overall point is rather clear.
“Remanufacturing is profitable,” it concluded, but not in isolation.
“The use of repurposed post-vehicle-application lithium-ion batteries has the potential to reduce the cost of a stationary energy storage system by up to 75 percent, versus the use of new lithium-ion batteries,” the report’s lead author and MNTRA director Charles Standridge told Solar Energy. Standridge is also the assistant dean of Grand Valley State University’s college of engineering, another Michigan entity in search of lasting transportation alternatives.
“This makes the use of such systems affordable to many more users such as homeowners, local utilities for grid scale applications, and businesses for local energy storage,” he added. “Such systems support the gathering of electricity at off-peak rates and using renewable sources, as well as a providing a buffer against power outages.”
While the lithium-ion applications are indeed widening — and many see the rise of home solar storage systems as key to continuing the solar revolution, the inflated concern over costs are narrowing. It’s getting cheaper to manufacture and remanufacture batteries and their disassembled component materials, the report explained, and “repurposing is profitable if the development cost is no more than $83/kWh to $114/kWh, depending on research and development expenses.” Of course, the costs of research and development can (and should) be borne by us all, including the aforementioned public and private entities researching future infrastructure, as well as often distracted consumers unable to look past their trash. Especially if we are all really serious about what the report loftily calls our shared “principles of environmentalism and sustainability.”
You’ve got to pay to play, now more than ever.
On that note, our dollars and options are stretching when it comes to putting lithium-ion batteries back in business. Especially in our slowly electrifying fleet, which can find uses for once-dead energy storage in a variety of vehicles. “Post-vehicle-application batteries can be remanufactured for continued use in on-road vehicles, or off-road vehicles such as golf carts,” Standridge told SolarEnergy.
Of course, we’ll likely get much better putters soon, as lithium-ion innovations take off. A recent Department of Energy laboratory doubled lithium-ion battery capacity by adding a nanostructure silicon sponge.
Stay patient for the electric jetpack.
This article appeared at Solar Energy