On a hot, flat, empty stretch of desert in Lancaster, one company is trying to solve two of renewable energy’s biggest problems at once.
Problem one: There’s a dearth of clean energy sources in the evening, when the demand for that energy is at its highest.
Problem two: Electric vehicle batteries contain a lot of precious metals that need to be extracted from the earth — a very energy-intensive process. But as they get older, the battery’s mileage range drops, meaning drivers are often ready to replace their cars long before the batteries stop working completely.
B2U Storage Solutions is using the excess supply of used batteries to meet the high demand for stored clean energy. “It's pretty simple: Take it out of the car, put it in, cable it up. And it's ready to go,” says Rachel Harper, B2U’s operations project manager.
Next to the vast, neat rows of solar panels sits a handful of white trailers. Inside are more than 1000 old EV batteries stacked on top of each other, each holding about 60-70% of their original charge capacity. They’re hooked up to wires, taking in the energy the solar panels gather during the day. Harper says the whole process — driving the old EV up to the trailer, taking the battery out of the car, and installing it in the trailer — takes 15-30 minutes.
Combiner boxes hold wires from each battery in each trailer. Here is where the energy flowing from the batteries is combined to get sent to converters. Photo by Caleigh Wells.
The solar panels contain photovoltaic (PV) cells. Those cells absorb sunlight, and then the sun’s energy flows out of the panel and into a DC converter. The converter basically translates that energy into a language the car batteries can understand.
“The PV will be at varying levels depending on the load and amount of sunlight. The batteries are always going to be at a certain voltage. And so [the] DC converter adapts the voltage to match the PV during the day to allow it to charge,” says B2U Electrical Engineer Dustin Wasson.
B2U Storage Solutions uses roughly 1300 EV batteries at its Lancaster site, and plans to expand to more sites. Photo courtesy of B2U Storage Solutions.
Then the sun goes down, and the electricity gets sent to California’s grid.
“Usually that's used when there's like very high demand on the grid,” says Yamen Nanne, a manager at LADWP leading the utility’s charge into this clean, electric future.
Utilities like LADWP don’t buy this solar energy directly, but they are using it. The solar power goes straight to “the grid,” which is this big statewide transmission system that utilities pull from, especially in high-demand hours.
“We are planning to integrate very, very large amounts of distributed solar and energy storage on our system. So you know, this is exactly the type of market based solutions that we're looking for,” says Nanne.
B2U makes money doing this because solar power’s price varies depending on the time of day — it’s cheaper and more abundant when the sun is up, and more expensive when it has to be stored in a battery for later use after the sun sets. Since the City of LA is committed to running completely on renewable energy by 2045, they’re willing to pay that extra price.
“That would typically add a premium on the cost of solar,” says Nanne. “It could be, instead of five cents a kilowatt hour, it might become anywhere from seven to nine cents.”
That’s where B2U’s co-founder, Freeman Hall, saw an opportunity to make a profit. “That, of course, then would lead to much higher prices in periods when the sun is not shining, but where the demand for power is still high,” he says.
So far, B2U is getting its supply of used EV batteries directly from automakers like Nissan and Honda that have battery packs that didn’t meet requirements, got replaced by a warranty, or are in returned leased vehicles that can no longer be resold. Eventually B2U plans for the batteries to get recycled after five or six years of holding onto this solar power, but the company is so young that it’s still using the very first car batteries it got.
Used EV batteries are pulled out of cars and plugged directly into wires in these trailers to begin their second careers as clean energy storage batteries. Photo courtesy of B2U Storage Solutions.
Right now, B2U’s competition is relatively thin because there aren’t that many old EV batteries. But Hall expects that to change: “At first, it was only selling 10, 20, 30,000 in the first couple of years. But now we're selling over 2 million EVs a year, and that is a number that's rising rapidly,” he says.
Former research scientist Antony Tong used to test battery technology for the Department of Energy and the California Energy Commission. He thought this was such a great idea, he founded Smartville, which provides stationary energy storage from repurposed EV batteries, just like B2U does.
He says the type of batteries used in EVs still provides the best energy storage option.
“In the modern sense of energy storage … the be-all-end-all option for storage today is the lithium ion batteries,” says Tong.
B2U believes in the idea so much, it’s expanding. Hall says the company plans to replicate the model used in Lancaster at another solar farm in Santa Barbara County.