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I've heard lots of people mention that concerns about the sustainability of electric vehicles are mitigated when you consider that at end-of-life the batteries can be reused as stationary, grid connected energy storage systems. To what extent is this happening in practice?
I'm not interested in small pilot projects or research studies.
Recycling batteries sounds very noble. But fruitless. Because recycling batteries to make "Grid storage" for communities......That's a lot of batteries. New York City uses 11,000 Megawatt hours of electricity a day! You'd have to gather 110,000 tesla batteries to store a days worth of electric use. Batteries are a horrible way to provide energy, they cost 10-20 dollars a pound, hydrocarbon storage (a steel drum) costs $0.75 Even if you recycle the car batteries, they're probably not gonna find their way into cars again; even if they were they'll have to be reprocessed, in essence Re-manufactured to meet speculative demand for new cars. It takes the energy of 100 barrels of oil, to make just one battery from scratch, recycled contents or otherwise will save about half that. Worse, what's the quality of the battery that it can be re-adopted for other duties. So far Tesla has produced it's millionth car in april 2020. But the demand for ev batteries will outpace ALL recycling efforts. And the demand to replace our gas powered fleet with ev's will require a 1000 fold increase in those batteries and given their shelf life, they may not be available to donate for other uses. An EV future is an environmental nightmare.
