…Redwood believes that by 2030, end-of-life batteries could supply more than 50 percent of the entire energy storage market. Instead of grinding up used batteries to reclaim the critical materials inside, put them to work storing electricity. There have been many experiments done that re-purpose used EV batteries which no longer can supply enough power to meet the need for rapid acceleration in an EV but still have up to 80 percent of their original energy storage capacity available…

…Traditional energy storage systems are high density and require heavy-duty cooling. To avoid this, Redwood’s team opted for an open-air, low-density system mounted on above-ground cable trays.

Spreading packs out in the open air helps avoid the need for active refrigeration, and stripping away moving parts like fans and filters minimizes potential reliability failures. Keeping the wiring above ground and limiting the size of each modular component minimizes the need for large equipment. As Sun explained, the result is a storage system that is faster to build, easier to inspect after storms, and cheaper to keep running over time…

I suspect he is wrong - the average car is 12 year old, which means there are a lot of cars older than 24 years old still on the road. Of course cars do wear out and get scrapped, but just looking at broad statistics we should expect most EVs made since 2002 (after the EV1) are still on the road (this is broad statistics which doesn't consider fuel source at all - even though it is an important consideration I don't have data!) Which is to say there is no reason to think there are large numbers of batteries ready to be recycled. The first EVs are only now entering the phase where they are going to start getting scrapped - and there were not a lot of any of them made. There likely is a good business to be made recycling used car batteries. However if you want to get into it now is not the time to expand/scale , now is still time to be designing and testing the machines and processes you will be using when you scale. Anyone in this business should expect to still be losing many - your business plan should have real data showing real data of when you expect cars to be scrapped in numbers large enough to be wroth scaling.

One thing to keep in mind is that the car may outlast the battery, by a fair amount. If you look at Prius, there's been a fair amount of battery replacement there. I vaguely recall seeing that first gen Nissan Leaf batteries degraded enough to need replacement fairly quickly. On the flip side, seems the more carefully managed solutions with liquid cooling and maintaining buffers have been more robust than expected. Still, I ultimately agree with the assessment that the volumes aren't going to be there for a long time, just that batteries coming out can happen before the car is scrapped. But in terms of volumes, prior to 2019 there just weren't enough batteries going to be expecting much either way yet.

But isn't this exactly the thing the article is talking about? Using the degraded batteries that are no longer fit enough to be used in cars, but might still have 60-70 % capacity and be well suited for slow charging and stationary energy storage.