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.
Someone needs to offer to take EV batteries off the road. I've got a 2012 EV with a decent battery that I would sell for some amount of money, but there's neither offers from recyclers or any market for the car itself. Where are they getting these batteries from? By the time I give in and give it over to the junkyard it's likely too late.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
"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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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" -
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.
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/
Someone needs to offer to take EV batteries off the road. I've got a 2012 EV with a decent battery that I would sell for some amount of money, but there's neither offers from recyclers or any market for the car itself. Where are they getting these batteries from? By the time I give in and give it over to the junkyard it's likely too late.
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.
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...
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.
[delayed]
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
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
He's just talking his book. Their deployment this year was 1/4000th share of the BESS market.
Battery Energy Storage System for anyone else like me that has no knowledge of this world and their acronyms.
Reading between the lines of the corporate speak will validate my point. Redwood was founded in 2017.
"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.
We are only 5-6 years into the car ev market. Tesla model 3 started being sold in 2018 in meaningful numbers
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.
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.
So, basically the same reason recycling of PV modules hasn't taken off.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Find an installer who will warranty work using third party let alone used solar panels and then we can talk.
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.
> "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.
In 2040 fusion energy advancements will have gotten far enough to be the next technological step and make this redundant anyway
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.
> 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).
The regulatory hurdles are probably bigger than the difficult enough technological ones you mention.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
This is like a “fusion is only 20 years away” (or 15 in this case) joke, right?
It used to be 30. So fifty more years?
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.
Tesla batteries fail after 8 years at least from models up to 2014
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.
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.
[citation needed]
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
Sounds like what https://www.basepowercompany.com/ is doing
> 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.
All I can think is embodied energy? That’s weird.
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.)
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.
This is great! Now I have a place to take my old puffy Li-Ion batteries.
https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/recycle-with-us/
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
Looking forward to the grid-scale warehouse fire of battery packs popping off...
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.
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.
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.
For an EV you want a high energy density, because it impacts range. For grid storage, density doesn't matter as much.
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.
i have heard that hybrid's have a maintanance problem?
is not a concern, double the technologie in the same space?
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.
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.
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" -
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
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.