The Used-Battery Gold Rush Is Coming(www.theatlantic.com)
12 pointsby blondie9x5 hours ago1 comment
  • vablings4 hours ago
    The Battery Man!

    I have been seriously inspired by him and the works of other people like Dala from Battery Emulator. The only reason this project really took off is because Nissan actually has a document for second life use for the leaf battery.

    What is also quite funny is the CyberTracker right now is one of the largest capacity home storage batteries you can buy with a very very low-cost price per kWh and you also get a car lol.

    There are massive issues with this kind of stuff and most of them are regulatory. A huge EV battery is "not safe" to be inside your home despite the conditions for home usage being significantly less stressful and likely to cause a fire than it being in a vehicle. Furthermore, the advancement in battery chemistry means that fire risk now is still incredibly low but there is no legal way to have an EV battery for home storage since it's not UL Listed despite all of the regulations for NHTSA being much stricter than the regulations for UL

    If companies actually made equipment to plug directly into these batteries and sold them for a reasonable price rather than hacking together an inverter and a battery and playing pretend car to draw the power and close the contactors it could be a serious powerhouse for both home users and datacenter infrastructure.

    Here what actually needs to happen

    - Batteries need to be documented and all of the information is shared so that second life use is possible. Once example comes to mind is the Cybertruck has an 800v battery but allows charging at lower voltage stations by calling a secret internal command to split the packs into two. This should NOT BE PRIVATE

    - There needs to be a way for equipment to inherit some of these standards and become UL listed when installed correctly with supported equipment so that people can have these batteries in their home without voiding home insurance and adding risks.

    - Inverter manufactures must be forced to have a minimum standard for a compatible battery. No more walled gardens for hooking up both car batteries and even competing manufacturers batteries. This should also extend to control. This would kill the battery-emulator project which is probably the better thing to do.

    Now you might be asking how can we do all this? Simple, the same way we have encouraged domestic manufacturing of Inverters and Solar Panels!

    Remember guys, it always goes Reduce Reuse!!! Recycle. Recycling should be a last resort when economically viable reusage is not possible

    • deepspace3 hours ago
      Shout out to Moment Energy (no affiliation) who is doing a lot of the above. They repurpose EV batteries into UL-certified backup units for data centres. I believe they had to do a lot of reverse engineering to figure out how to communicate with the batteries 'properly', i.e. without pretending to be a car.
    • deepspace3 hours ago
      Shout out to Moment Energy (no affiliation) who is doing a lot of the above. They repurpose EV batteries into UL-certified backup units for data centres. I believe they had to do a lot of reverse engineering to figure out how to communicate with the batteries 'properly'.
    • blacksmith_tb3 hours ago
      Not sure I follow the argument - many people already have EVs in their garages, but if they had bi-directional charging those would be more dangerous? (I personally charge in the driveway because my garage is full of bikes and random clutter, but I would love to have V2G added to my PV+BESS).
      • vablings3 minutes ago
        No, it's completely fine but according to the standards its kind a loophole. My point being is that if you somehow remove the car part of the battery it becomes dangerous/uncertified which is dumb
      • triceratops3 hours ago
        They aren't saying EV batteries are actually more dangerous. The electrical code treats them as though they are dangerous.
        • vablings7 minutes ago
          That's not technically true either. It's just that the electrical code requires that any home battery storage system needs to be UL listed. Which car EV batteries are not