From Fast Company, June 27:
This massive new data center is powered by used EV batteries
A new project from battery recycling startup Redwood Materials and data center builder Crusoe shows that it’s possible to build data centers cheaper and faster while also slashing emissions.
Over the last two months, a first-of-a-kind project has taken shape at an industrial site in Nevada: the world’s largest microgrid built with used EV batteries, designed to power an adjacent data center.
It’s the first of a series of microgrids planned by Redwood Materials, the battery recycling company now valued at more than $5 billion. The company is taking in a quickly-growing volume of used EV batteries—tens of thousands over the last year, and perhaps hundreds of thousands over the next 12 months. Most of those batteries still have enough capacity to have a second life before the materials are recycled. And they could help deal with a major energy challenge: how new data centers can come online quickly and cheaply without straining the grid and significantly adding to climate emissions.
“The amount of batteries coming back that have usable life and that are relatively more cost-efficient to deploy has ramped up dramatically in just the last year or two,” says JB Straubel, CEO of Redwood Materials. The company announced its new energy business arm at an event on June 26.
Straubel, one of Tesla’s cofounders, left the automaker in 2019 to help build a new U.S. supply chain of critical battery materials using the growing pile of battery waste. Last year, the company started commercial production of cathode active material, one key component in batteries, from recycled materials. Its recycling business is already profitable; it generated $200 million in revenue last year. But it also recognized the huge opportunity to put some batteries to work again.
How EV batteries can find a second life
When a battery is in a car or a truck, “it’s a pretty demanding application,” Straubel says. “You need a lot of power capability. You really want to charge quickly, usually, so you can go to fast charge stations. And you also need a pretty high percent of your overall initial range that you purchased in the car.”But even when a battery has lost so much capacity that it no longer makes sense for driving, it can still be used to store energy. In that application, charging and discharging can happen slowly. A battery might only have half of its original capacity, but can still reliably support the grid or a microgrid. In some cases, it could be used for years before it’s eventually recycled.
In the new microgrid, on Redwood’s campus near Reno, more than 800 used EV batteries are connected to 20 acres of solar panels. It has enough power to run a new AI data center on the site, built by Crusoe, a company that designs and deploys low-carbon compute infrastructure.
The data center operates fully off the grid, without an external backup. “We still expect [the microgrid] to be very, very reliable,” Straubel says. “In some cases, it might be more reliable, because we have less failure points.” To make it possible to avoid the grid completely, the team built a relatively large amount of solar power and large battery capacity....
....MUCH MORE
We have a lot of posts on Redwood. One of the more interesting recent ones was:
