End-of-life or second-life options for retired electric vehicle batteries
Juner Zhu, Ian Mathews, Dongsheng Ren, Wei Li, Daniel A. Cogswell, Bobin Xing, Tobias Sedlatschek, Sai Nithin R. Kantareddy, Mengchao Yi, Tao Gao, Yong Xia, Qing Zhou, Tomasz Wierzbicki, Martin Z. Bazant
Abstract
E-mobility, especially electric cars, has been scaling up rapidly because of technological advances in lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). However, LIBs degrade significantly with service life cycles. With the current increase in the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), a large volume of retired LIB packs, which can no longer provide satisfactory performance to power an EV, will soon appear. Various end-of-life (EOL) options are under development, such as recycling and recovery. Recently, stakeholders have become more confident that giving the retired batteries a second life by reusing them in less-demanding applications, such as stationary energy storage, may create new value pools in the energy and transportation sectors. In this perspective, we evaluate the feasibility of second-life battery applications, from economic and technological perspectives, based on the latest industrial reports and technical publications.