91–100 of 297 posts
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 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/e…
In time there will be consolidation. This constellation of EV startup bottom-feeders will be decimated along with the 'excuses' to not make money.
I don't think the problem is that EV batteries are lasting longer, it is just that the EV market from before the Model 3 came along is miniscule. Hence not many second hand batteries to recycle.
As for EV batteries and their availability, when was the last time you saw an OG Tesla Model S with the fake grill? Those cars used to be everywhere, but where are they now? The German EVs that came out to compete, for example, Taycan and eTron, those things are not going to last the distance since the repairs cost a fortune and the parts supply is limited.
All considered, there will come a time before 2040+ when there are large quantities of these electric car batteries to upcycle, by which time the EV business will be consolidated with only a few players.
If there was money in recycling cars then every auto manufacturer would be in on it.
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 easi…
i have heard that hybrid's have a maintanance problem? is not a concern, double the technologie in the same space?
People do/did have frustrations with gas car mannerisms and mental approachability, like, everything was written in a mix of translated foreign language documents and borderline insane gearhead languages. That lead them to imagine that removing the gas part would drastically change the industry, in their favor.
But, in the end, gas cars are good with regular maintenance for something like 100k miles over 8 years, so, I wouldn't know what consumer product were more reliable than a gas car in the first place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 demonstrate…
High temperature superconducting magnets are not a panacea for the problems with DT fusion. Those issues follow from limits on power/area at the first wall, and the needed thickness of the first wall; these ensure DT reactors will have low volumetric power density, regardless of the confinement scheme used. With HTSC magnets, a tokamak much smaller than ITER could be built, but ITER is so horrifically bad that one ca…
> But even though radiation damage rates and heat transfer requirements are much more severe in a fusion reactor, the power density is only one-tenth as large. This is a strong indication that fusion would be substantially more expensive than fission because, to put it simply, greater effort would be required to produce less power.
https://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Tro...
Funny issue I learned after talking to a founder at a similar company: although the battery packs were certified safe for cars (passing crash tests, wild heat differences from AK to AZ, people sitting on top of the battery packs in the car) ... the founder had issues re-certifying the batteries for safe use in a static location for grid storage.
The certification process treated his company like the batteries were made from scratch even though they used the same BMS/coolant lines/etc. already proven and tested.
It's clear you still need strong safety regulations and practices in the rare case there's an event, but the founder noted the grid storage industry regulations were adding redundant safety testing and slowing down adoption. The founder also added it's difficult to compete on cost even with effectively free used EV batteries in this startup space of grid storage against the low cost of Chinese made grid-specific batteries due to the added testing + custom hardware + space constraints and other items. (Caveat: I didn't fact check any of their statements)
The last time there was anything rational on the table was Perry under the Trump administration's 30-day rule proposal ( https://www.nucnet.org/news/nuclear-is-vital-to-us-national-... ). It gave a hard industry incentive to any energy supplier who can have 30 days' fuel on site. This means nuclear and coal. This was no gimmick, it was the first time anyone faced reality about National Security as related to Energy for the grid and survival. And now AI datacenter yadda yadda, we're also talking about the luxury of keeping schools heated in Winter. Adverse weather even for a week is grid down game over for wind and solar. Proven natural gas are ~300 years, joy! As soon as they get around to sending pregnant whales across the ocean (losing ~20% of the gas-energy in cooling) it may even last 50 years! Before we have to go to endless war again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Tends to be tight lipped??? It is in the catalog[1]! It is more that American consumers aren't tech obsessed than Toyota being reluctant to share. Even just looking at online media reports[2][3] clearly sourced from some exact same press event, it is obvious that US English equivalents are much lighter in content than Japanese versions. They're putting the information out, no one's reading it. It's just been the type…
There's a consumer profit margin to absorb the repackaging and teardown.
Maybe for home grid batteries they'll work too. Again, a consumer margin.
Sodium Ion and other grid-specific storage will simply be too cheap for secondhand EV batteries to compete. And the retiring cells won't be any better in density and will be less safe than the higher density sodium ion and LFP that is hitting the market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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, 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 an…