BATTERY STORAGE
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Second-life lithium-ion battery scenario The excessive use of lithium-ion batteries to cut vehicular emission will certainly create pollution of a different sort. To pre-empt the problem, second-use battery options need to be promoted, both from an environmental and financial aspect.
W
ith an increasing use of battery for different applications, the concerns associated with the disposal or reuse of used batteries is gaining importance. In the absence of efficient recycling technology, many of the modern battery technologies such as lithium-ion battery (LIB) end up in landfills. In such a scenario, dealing with the huge amount of retired batteries for a second useful life is gaining considerable interest among researchers as well as industries. These batteries are generally known as secondlife battery (SLB) and the primary source of these batteries is the electric vehicle. This is because of a huge penetration of EVs in the market, which will become a major source of a large number of
retired batteries once their use in the vehicles is over.
Second-life battery projects globally
Currently the deployment of SLBs is limited to commercial use. Although some notable projects are undertaken globally to validate real-life applications, most of them are research rather commercial projects such as: • The University of California, Davis employed a second-life energy storage system for their RMI Winery Microgrid Project and these batteries were sourced from Nissan Leaf EVs. • In Hamburg, Germany, BMW, Vattenfall and Bosch together constructed a 2 MW, 2800 kWh second-life battery energy
storage system (SLBESS) for grid support • In 2013, ABB and General Motors used second-life EV batteries to build a 25 kW, 25 kWh energy storage system in San Francisco, US and the used batteries were from the Chevrolet Volt, an electric hybrid. • Toyota built a stand-alone 85 kWh SLBESS to support 40 kW photovoltaic system using 208 nickel metal hybrid (NiMH) batteries at the Lamar Buffalo Ranch at the Yellowstone National Park, USA. In 2015, Nissan switched to commercial production of SLBESS. There are other notable SLB projects around the world and these are listed in Table 1.
Table 1: Important second-life battery projects Sr. No.
Joint Ventures
Description
Location
1.
Daimler/ GETEC/The Mobility House/ Remondis/EnBW
Battery storage unit with a total capacity of 13 MWh using degraded EV batteries from Daimler EV models
Luenen, Germany
2.
BMW/PG&E
18-month pilot project to demonstrate EV smart charging and optimization of grid efficiency with participation of 100 BMW i3 owners
San Francisco, USA
3.
4R energy (JV between Nissan and Sumitomo) / Green Charge Network
System (600 kWh/400 kWh): 16 Nissan Leaf LIBs regulate energy from a solar plant
Osaka, Japan
4.
BMW/Vattenfall/Bosch
2,600 battery modules from 100 electric cars, and provides 2 MW of output and 2.8 MWh of capacity
Hamburg, Germany
5.
Renault/Connected Energy Ltd.
E-STOR system: on-grid, providing energy storage that prevents power grid overload and balances supply and demand
UK
6.
Mitsubishi/PSA/EDF/ Forsee Power/MMC
Bi-directional battery energy consumption optimization from retired batteries
Paris, France
7.
General Motors/ABB
Five Chevrolet Volt LIBs, 74 kW solar array and two 2 kW wind turbines to power a General Motors office building site
USA
| May-June 2020
