Electric vehicle battery recycling or reuse? Both is important!

Look around: Since electric vehicles (EVs) don't have an internal combustion engine, you may not hear them drive, but more and more EVs are quietly becoming the workhorses of the road. In fact, according to the World Economic Forum, 2.3 million electric vehicles will be sold in 2020, a four-fold increase from the number of electric vehicles sold five years ago. Consumer demand, the development of electric vehicle battery charging infrastructure, and the development of various regulations in favor of electrification by cities and countries have all contributed to this dramatic shift. While electric vehicles are touted as a green alternative to internal combustion engines and fossil fuels, they have an Achilles heel: What if all those half-ton EV batteries can no longer store enough electricity to power the car?

Today, EV battery recycling is a very common option, but the process only recovers some of the raw materials (such as cobalt and lithium), not all. However, EV battery recycling is costly, lacks regulation, and lacks a well-defined supply chain.

The growing cost of discarded batteries

Batteries remain the primary concern for EV cost efficiency. The battery is at the heart of an electric vehicle and accounts for about 30% of the total cost of an electric vehicle. But significant improvements in battery technology are on the horizon: Significant advances in battery chemistry and electronics can reduce costs, enable efficient battery reuse, cascade reuse, and facilitate EV battery recycling, providing a cost advantage to drive EV adoption.

Effective battery health monitoring during the battery's first use and any subsequent life cycle will help build trust between battery buyers and sellers. Based on this trust, OEMs can use batteries as an asset to compensate for some of the initial battery investment and indirectly transfer the value of their savings to consumers.

Reuse first, then recycle

Battery reuse is the process of identifying cells in a battery pack that still retain usable charge, disassembling the pack, and reassembling those usable cells. This alternative to recycling (or more precisely, this transitional approach) is emerging in the form of "battery cascades." When the charge capacity of a car's lithium-ion battery drops to 70 to 80 percent of its original capacity (usually after 8 to 10 years), it can no longer effectively power the car and needs to be replaced. The number of these batteries that are no longer in use continues to increase, resulting in a new market opportunity - the "battery cascade utilization market".

With battery pack costs accounting for more than 30% of EV prices, there are clear economic and environmental incentives for battery makers, automakers, regulators and even insurance companies to actively cultivate the tiered-utilization market. The most direct route is the application of energy storage systems (ESS), which enables the cells that are still available in old battery packs to be reused in the renewable energy grid to store energy generated by wind, solar, hydro or geothermal power plants. excess power. Electric vehicle batteries can also be disassembled into smaller battery modules for less demanding uses such as power tools, forklifts or electric scooters.

The emerging secondary battery market is not without obstacles in terms of technology, quality control and implementation. For example, today's electric vehicle batteries use electrical wiring harnesses to monitor the battery's state of charge. These harnesses (and others) must all be removed before the battery can be redeployed, adding cost and design complexity. End-of-life disassembly in product design will become a trend where designers can extend hard-wired battery monitoring systems (BMS) using wireless BMS (wBMS) technology. A wireless BMS could not only reduce the size, weight, and material cost of electric vehicles, but also enable safer and more scalable robotic disassembly and assembly processes for battery packs.