Input volume is low because vehicle batteries last forever. Importantly, we can ramp on QA rejects, salavaged vehicles, etc before there are tens of millions of EVs out there (not to mention stationary storage that will eventually EOL) needing waste management. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Yes, vehicle batteries and stationary storage are used in much more "forgiving" environments than laptops and power tools, when it comes to cell life. Lower power draw, better battery management systems, less temperature fluctuation, less physical impact.
Battery production is still massively wasteful in terms of partially finished or finished products that need to be scrapped. The reason is that battery quality is critical at every level. One tiny piece of iron embedded in one battery out of a million can mean a catastrophic fire and tens of millions in damages. If there is a systemic defect that manifests during cell testing and is caught, the whole production batch should be scrapped. Most of this scrap happens before the batteries are shipped, and you never see it, except in this too-honest article. You see how this plays out in car fires, resulting from battery defects, resulting in large recalls.
Run into defects in semiconductor manufacturing, and scrap cost is lower, and you don't have an obvious and direct link between the defects and catastrophic failure modes.
Keeping iron particles and manufacturing defects out of batteries isn't a "solvable" problem. You try to minimize it and catch it. Without technical breakthroughs and using existing technologies, the higher the batteries' performance, the less the margin for error.
We don't have a good baseline cultural understanding for what lithium-ion batteries are. In general, household batteries, AAs, AAAs, car batteries use a water-based electrolyte. They do not catch fire. Lithium-ion batteries use an organic solvent as electrolyte and when punctured, dropped, or just cycling in everyday use if defective, turn into red-hot self-propelled blowtorches.
> Many will be amazed to learn that Nic Thomas, Nissan’s marketing director for the UK, told Forbes recently, “Almost all of the [EV] batteries we’ve ever made are still in cars, and we’ve been selling electric cars for 12 years. We haven’t got a great big stock of batteries that we can convert into something else,” he added. “It’s the complete opposite of what people feared when we first launched EVs — that the batteries would only last a short time.”
> In fact, many EV batteries may outlast the vehicles they are installed in, then enjoy a second life in a stationary storage application before finally being recycled, according to EVANNEX. “At the end of the vehicle’s life — 15 or 20 years down the road — you take the battery out of the car and it’s still healthy with perhaps 60 or 70% of usable charge,” Thomas said.
> “It’s more sustainable to take the battery pack out of the car after 20 years, recycle the car, and reuse the battery. By far the easiest thing to do is take the complete battery out of the vehicle, put it in a shipping container in a rack, and plug that into a solar farm.”
Can’t speak to a Leaf, but I have fast DC charged my 2018 Model S almost exclusively over the last 100k miles and its pack has degraded only 6%.
"Almost all of the [EV] batteries we’ve ever made are still in cars."
That's because replacing the battery in a 2011 Nissan Leaf will likely "total" the car (in that, the replacement cost would be more than the car is worth). It's the boat we're in now. Five, six, eight grand to replace the battery for a car that even dealers are only asking $7K for. Where are the cheap replacement batteries that we were promised when we bought the car? My guess is, "we'd rather place those batteries in $70K cars, so those are the customers you're competing with for battery supply." So that's how we're going to replace the battery: with a new Hyundai IONIQ 5.
In fact, many EV batteries may outlast the vehicles they are installed in, then enjoy a second life in a stationary storage application before finally being recycled, according to EVANNEX.
"May", or may not. We don't know, because despite the chatter, I'm not seeing this secondary car battery use. Probably because no one replaces the batteries, because...it's not worth it.
Can’t speak to a Leaf, but I have fast DC charged my 2018 Model S...
Your Tesla also has the advantage of seven years of battery advancement over our Leaf, which has degraded 25%. And the Leaf battery thermal management is non-existent. OTOH, as my wife and I push up against retirement age, with a liquid-cooled battery pack and the 12 years of learning about battery management, I'm assuming that the battery in the new Ioniq 5 coming this week will outlive us.
Yeah the Leaf ~2011 is infamous as an earlier "bad" battery design so I wouldn't extrapolate too much from it. The reality is also that as battery capacity increases, people simply won't notice 10-15% degradation of the pack because their commute is so much shorter than the vehicule's range.
And I'm not really extrapolating too much from it, as I expect our soon-to-be-in-the-driveway Ioniq 5 to perform much better (as in, outlives me). The Leaf was the first mass-market electric car in, what, 100 years? Yeah, we expected some early-adopter teething pains (including a short-lived battery), and we have no complaints with the OG Leaf, enough so that we swore off ICE vehicles years ago and await our 2nd electric car.
But at the same time, it's a counter to Nissan marketing guy trying to mansplain to me about their battery lifecycle. I own one of your batteries, Marketing Guy, and I'm detecting slight hints of marketing bullshit.
> That's because replacing the battery in a 2011 Nissan Leaf will likely "total" the car (in that, the replacement cost would be more than the car is worth).
Yeah, well, totalling shouldn't work like that. A car with a new battery should be worth several thousand more, and the totalling calculation for replacing the battery should be based on the post-work value, not the pre-work value.
The leaf is notorious for fast degradation in hot climates due to a poor cooling system. The model S, by 2018 anyway, sets the bar for both thermal and charging management. People outside of those climates mostly think about cold being a temporary range reducer, but if 40c is a normal or even cool summer day where you live, many EVs are simply off the table due to battery life concerns. The population of places with that sort of climate is growing faster than the others, so it really is worth addressing.
> many EVs are simply off the table due to battery life concerns
What EVs would be off the table? The Leaf is notably bad in this regard, as you mention, because the battery is passively cooled. However, all the other EVs I'm aware of are actively cooled and should be fine in hot temps.
It's an earnest question—I don't know anything except as a consumer who's shopped around for an EV, and as a resident of a hot climate I'd be interested in knowing what I need to look out for.
The spot checks I've done mostly show everything but nissan and gm having active cooling beyond a fan. But even within liquid cooling not all use the ac to keep the pack below ambient temp nwhen it gets too hot. I think kia and tesla are the only two I decided I was sure would be ok.
I can vouch for battery hookup, they even sell new/never used overstock sometimes. Pretty good way to build your own battery back up system, which has helped me a lot when we lost power here in quebec for 4 days last week.
You can buy old Tesla modules (typically from wrecked cars) on eBay. Once in a while I see people on the RV forums use them instead of LFP, though honestly I'd much rather have LFP for RV or home energy storage than regular lithium ion.
> Because, taken literally, our 2011 Nissan Leaf would like a word with you.
2011 was a particularly bad year for the Leaf. And they were not great (battery life-wise) before 2015 ('lizard pack').
The newer ones are faring much better. Sure, this is of no consolation for your Leaf, but I'd keep an eye for a battery pack from a Leaf that's totaled for other reasons (minor accident causing airbag deployment, for example). You can even add a larger battery than the one your model came with.
Chevy Volt batteries are holding up great even in 2012 models. There are definitely people experiencing failures of a cell leading to bricking the car, or even a temp sensor failure in the pack leading to the vehicle bricking itself, but for 95%+ of people it seems like a decade old battery is doing great. I've got 170k miles on my decade old Volt and everything seems good as new for now.
Nissan for whatever reason never chose to do (and still doesn't do in 2023) active battery thermal management that every other EV manufacturer does - I have a Ford Focus EV (2017) and despite being a complete econobox compliance vehicle (which I still love) it actively manages battery heat.
Luckily Leafs are a minority of all EVs so the point still stands - EV batteries will likely outlive the car.
I'm guessing the battery in your Nissan Leaf only has maybe 60% of its capacity when new? That's not so bad that a battery would be deemed unusable. If you didn't want that battery, that battery probably would not end up in a recycling site but reused in other low energy-density use cases.
I figure that over 10 years later, the fact that the only example that consistently comes up is the Nissan Leaf means we've made excellent progress on EV batteries. It's the exception proving the rule.
I suspect stationary storage will never EOL. Even after tens of thousands of recharge cycles, the battery can still store some energy, perhaps just 10% of the design capacity, but thats still worth something so it's still worth running.
The only time it is worth throwing out is if the land is valuable and you need it for another project.
This does depend on there not being much 'parasitic load' - ie. fans and pumps which run 24x7 which cost money to run even when they aren't really needed when the battery capacity and charge/discharge speed is really low.
With SoH decreasing the internal resistance increases and the battery inherently becomes a fire hazard. At some point the energy required for cooling will not be justifiable and the battery will have to be decommissioned.
As internal resistance rises, you just need to charge slower...
A battery that normally takes an hour to charge can charge 10x slower and take 10 hours to charge, and still be providing some useful value. (nearly everywhere will have a day/night power price discrepancy, as well as a weekday vs weekend discrepancy, and a hot/cold weather discrepancy - so there are lots of timescales over which money can be made)
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/09/21/surprise-nissan-leaf-ba...
Not super familiar with Ascend ground truth, but very familiar with Redwood Materials state of the art.