Industrial Automation Magazine India

Used EV batteries may have second life in Solar Energy Farms

Published on : Wednesday 27-05-2020

Batteries that are no longer efficient for electric vehicles could have alternate use in solar energy farms.

May 2020 – Electric vehicle batteries that are past their peak efficiency and no longer performing to their desired potential must be replaced. A recently published report by MIT researchers suggests these used EV batteries could be used as storage batteries in solar energy farms giving them a second life. The idea is not exactly new. It was first suggested in 2012 at an ABB Centre of Excellence in the US, and later in 2015 Mercedes-Benz too had mooted a proposal to use such batteries for energy storage needs. Recently Japanese automaker Honda too has talked about this possibility.

The MIT researchers have examined the pros and cons of such a project under different operational conditions using new batteries as well as used EV batteries with different levels of efficiency to work out the viability of such an exercise. The result points out that a well managed solar energy farm can indeed be viable if the cost of used batteries is less than 60% of the new ones. But there could still be challenges as different batteries from EVs could have different levels of efficiency affecting the overall performance. Also the charge discharge cycles would also matter.

But as more and more solar projects are commissioned, the demand for energy storage farms is going to increase and in such a scenario this is an idea that is worth exploring by employing analytical tools and designing batteries for EVs with this second life in mind.