[joss]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56574779

“The rate at which we’re growing the industry is absolutely scary,” says Paul Anderson from Birmingham University.
He’s talking about the market for electric cars in Europe.
By 2030, the EU hopes, there will be 30 million electric cars on European roads.
“It’s something that’s never really been done before at that rate of growth for a completely new product,” says Dr Anderson, who is also the co-director of the Birmingham Centre for Strategic Elements and Critical Materials.
While electric vehicles (EVs) may be carbon neutral during their working lifetime, he’s concerned about what happens when they run out of road – in particular what happens to the batteries.
“In 10 to 15 years when there are large numbers coming to the end of their life, it’s going to be very important that we have a recycling industry,” he points out.

Joss
Current car: BMW X2 sDrive 20i M Sport 5dr Step Auto In metallic Portimão Blue. 04:10:2025
Previous car:Peugeot 308 GT Premium 1.2 Pure tech Petrol.

Topic

[Intranicity]

There’s a big market for old batteries in storage walls for solar and wind energy initially. EV batteries seem to be considered used once they’ll only hold 70% of their original charge, that looks like a life in real use of well in excess of 100k miles, and then they have many years of life as a power wall. But after that they will need recycling

Previous Motability Cars
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2021 - 2023 Hyundai Kona Electric Premium SE
2023 - Hyundai Kona Electric Ultimate

[sif]

Its called kicking the can down the road

[joss]

One use for these 70% batteries is to power the transport bots in car factories. I think it’s Renault that uses them in this way.

Joss
Current car: BMW X2 sDrive 20i M Sport 5dr Step Auto In metallic Portimão Blue. 04:10:2025
Previous car:Peugeot 308 GT Premium 1.2 Pure tech Petrol.

[Richard]

They’re too valuable not to be recycled or reused ultimately. A battery not fit for an EV can either be refurbished with the dodgy cell replaced & then refitted to a car (See James do this to a Nissan leaf on YouTube) or they can be turned into off grid storage like tesla power walls or bought up & utilised by the national grid for balancing, smoothing power input effectively as a huge UPS for sensitive systems like industry

Of course theres always straight up recycling, only a matter of time until a factory can strip these down to individual component elements. Both cobalt & lithium can be reused infinitely so as long as we can get most of it back out we’ll be OK.

I think this is a short term problem really, once the glass electrolyte batteries are ready they don’t degrade from dendrite growth, they aren’t volatile & have a much much higher energy density so hopefully in a few years this won’t be so much of an issue.

[gothitjulie]

You can even use old EV battery cells to make packs to run your electric wheelchair instead of lead acid batteries, saving considerable weight & allowing greater range.

 

[joss]

Very good point there Julie. It just needs someone with the vision to do such projects.

Joss
Current car: BMW X2 sDrive 20i M Sport 5dr Step Auto In metallic Portimão Blue. 04:10:2025
Previous car:Peugeot 308 GT Premium 1.2 Pure tech Petrol.

[Richard]

Yeah you’d want someone breaking them down & selling tested cells because despite having a lot of electrical experience & knowledge I wouldn’t want to work stripping a battery at many hundreds of volts potential.

It’d be interesting to see if someone produced a case to fit scooters/wheelchairs from car battery cells although there’d be logistics like getting correct voltage & current etc but it’s not a bad idea

[joss]

Here is a useful web site of a UK (Wales) EV recycling facility. It gives a good in site int0 what is involved and the repurposing of used EV batteries. Have a look here.

Joss
Current car: BMW X2 sDrive 20i M Sport 5dr Step Auto In metallic Portimão Blue. 04:10:2025
Previous car:Peugeot 308 GT Premium 1.2 Pure tech Petrol.

[Author]

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