Man Looks Into Battery Second Life

MAN has begun research into battery second life.

To ensure smooth proliferation of electric vehicles, the need to safely adapt and re-use depleted batteries when that time comes is demanding the attention of researchers and vehicle manufacturers. Vehicles demand very high performance from their batteries. Once the battery’s capacity declines past the 70 per cent or 80 per cent level, depending on the nature of usage, application, etc., the need to swap them would become necessary. The battery, at that point, can still handle a lot of charge and discharge, making it useful for storage in less intensive stationary settings. The sheer expense of developing and building batteries for electric vehicles, commercial vehicles especially, makes a compelling case to capture some additional value after their initial use. Their second-life application would delay the need to dispose them as resource-intensive products with none having yet figured out a way of doing so economically. If storage vendors can resell used batteries as a cheaper alternative to new storage, they could help more people consume their own roof-top solar generation, or reduce their peak demand for example. There are more number of uses that such batteries could address, advancing the progress of a low carbon grid in the process.