The minerals needed for electric vehicle batteries come with high financial and environmental costs. Repurposing used battery packs can lower costs, but repurposing is rare and the United States lacks standards for handling batteries after their use in cars.
Demand for the minerals used in electric vehicle batteries is expected to increase significantly in the coming decades amid the transition to EVs. These minerals, often sourced from outside the United States, are a scarce resource and make up a sizeable portion of an EV’s cost. Mining for the minerals has substantial negative impacts on the local environment and community where they are extracted, so it is important to use these resources to their fullest potential.
Recycling the minerals can produce new batteries, but many batteries reaching the end of their life in an EV can still be used elsewhere. Read the Policy Brief Repurposing them for stationary storage, for example, increases the value of the battery and helps maximize the investment and energy that went into creating it. A new ACEEE policy brief examines the benefits and challenges of repurposing EV batteries and identifies policy solutions that can expand repurposing. The brief is based on numerous discussions with industry and policy stakeholders.
Why should we repurpose EV batteries?
When an EV reaches the end of its life, its battery often still has upward of 80% of its original capacity and can be used in a home or business to store solar energy or provide back-up power. Repurposing EV batteries has a number of benefits, including lower emissions, reducing new battery production and the accompanying mining, and creating a lower-cost energy storage option. Recycling, itself an energy-intensive process, is ultimately needed but should be done when other reuse and repurposing alternatives have been exhausted.
A nascent repurposing industry has developed, with companies taking high-quality batteries out of EVs that have reached the end of their life and transforming the batteries into stationary storage products for customers wanting affordable and reliable energy storage. These companies usually either string multiple unmodified battery packs from EVs together to make a storage system or break down the packs and reassemble their components to make a more customizable system.
Lack of data access and high costs hinder battery repurposing efforts
The repurposing industry, however, faces serious barriers to growth and large-scale adoption. The biggest barrier is the lack of data on the individual battery packs repurposing companies purchase, especially data on the health of the battery, requiring significant testing to determine if they are even suitable for repurposing. Another major barrier is the cost and time it takes to certify the new stationary storage product is safe, which can cost millions of dollars per product type and needs to be repeated if a new EV battery type is used.
Other challenges include logistical and financial barriers to transport battery packs, issues around pack disassembly, and health and safety concerns. There are also perceptions of risk from used batteries, which can deter some customers.
Key policies can remove roadblocks and expand battery life
The United States lacks a framework to address what should happen to batteries at the end of their life in an EV, meaning we are missing an opportunity to get the full value out of batteries and improve the sustainability of the EV transition. A comprehensive framework should require repurposing to be considered before a battery is recycled and should make repurposing easier. Policies to increase repurposers’ access to data on EV batteries are critical to ensuring the batteries are used to their fullest potential after they are taken out of an EV. One key policy needed in a battery repurposing framework is requiring data tracked by the vehicle’s software to be accessible as the battery changes hands. This and other data, like the battery’s composition, can also be shared via a centralized system in which each battery has a unique identifier, referred to as a battery passport system.
Updates to safety certification to ease the process and reduce the considerable logistical and financial burdens for repurposing companies can also boost the industry. This can include giving more flexibility around testing and data requirements and enforcing consistency across the independent labs that conduct the necessary safety testing. Requiring automakers to be responsible for what happens to the battery after it leaves the vehicle is another option. This policy can also include incentives for battery designs that would make repurposing easier and would require testing be done after the battery is taken out of the EV. Repurposing needs to be part of any battery end-of-life policy to ensure batteries with significant remaining useful life are not recycled too early.
A thriving EV battery repurposing industry can improve the sustainability of the entire battery industry and extend the benefits of energy storage to more people with lower-cost products. But federal, state, and local governments will need to step up to enable this future.
