Can the scrapped electric vehicle power battery continue to store energy for photovoltaic?

A research team from MIT recently published an article in Applied Energy magazine, analyzing the economic feasibility of using retired electric vehicle power batteries to provide energy storage services for solar photovoltaic power stations. They concluded that if the price of used batteries can be lower than 60% of that of new batteries, supplemented by appropriate operation control strategies, it can also be cost-effective to use waste power batteries as new energy storage.

Ian Mathews, the first author of the paper and a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, believes that the cascade utilization of power cells to provide energy storage for photovoltaic power stations is "really feasible".

ecent years, the technology of electric vehicles has become increasingly mature, and with the policy support of various countries at different levels, the global sales of electric vehicles have reached new highs. However, unlike conventional fuel vehicles, although the car can drive for a long time, the battery on the electric vehicle is not good. With the increase of the number of charging and discharging cycles of the battery, the maximum energy it can store - the capacity of the battery will gradually decline. When the capacity drops to less than 80% of the original capacity, it will not be able to meet the requirements of mileage, and the battery must be replaced.

The fate of discarded batteries replaced is often the recycling station. There, the precious metals, electrodes and other materials in the battery will be recycled, while the other parts will return to dust and soil after harmless treatment. Some institutions predict that the scrapped installed capacity of power batteries in China will reach about 25GWh in 2020. It‘s a pity that so many batteries that can still be used are scrapped.

Therefore, with the retirement of the first batch of power batteries in China two or three years ago, the concept of cascade utilization of power batteries has entered people‘s vision. Although it can no longer be used in cars, it still has 80% capacity, which is still "healthy" and can be "ambitious".

The so-called "capacity drops to 80% of the original capacity" does not mean that all batteries have dropped to 80%. The battery used in electric vehicles is composed of single cells, which are called cells. Many battery cells are connected in series and parallel to form a battery module. Many battery modules, together with management system, cooling system and control system, can finally form a battery pack installed on the vehicle.

Although they are produced and assembled in the same way, the performance of each cell is slightly different. After being assembled into the battery module, its usage is also different. By the time of scrapping, the capacity of the battery module had dropped to 80%, but the remaining power of each cell was high and low.

At present, the industry generally believes that scrapped power batteries are acceptable for low-speed electric vehicles and communication base stations.

But what we are most looking forward to is the use of second-hand power batteries for new energy storage. Energy storage technology is considered to be the bottleneck of energy transformation and the key to deal with climate change. Most battery experts believe that the new lithium battery cannot meet the requirements, and new chemical energy storage principles need to be developed to make the battery have lower cost and longer life. As for whether the second-hand power battery can effectively reduce the cost under the premise of ensuring the service life, there are still different opinions, and there is no exact answer.

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