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The Smartville startup has received $5.9 million from the US Department of Energy to expand its second-life battery program.
In 2021, global sales of electric vehicles will have reached 16 million units, reflecting the acceleration in demand, according to the International Energy Agency. The energy transition of transport has only just begun.
Most batteries being retired from electric vehicles still have about 70% of their capacity left, San Diego-based startup Smartville said, noting that this makes them an ideal candidate for second-life use. This is the opportunity that Smartville intends to seize, by repurposing electric vehicle batteries as grid-scale energy storage to store renewable energy.
“Our second-life energy storage product reuses electric vehicle batteries to reliably store solar and wind power,” explains Antoni Tong, CEO of Smartville. “The result is that the system can sustainably supply energy to our communities, decreasing our dependence on external energy sources.”
The company has announced that it has won a $5.9 million grant from the US Department of Energy to expand this service. The grant was part of a $75 million funding package made available through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, which awarded a total of 10 projects furthering efforts to recycle and reuse electric vehicle batteries.
Smartvilles MOAB product can accommodate six to ten battery packs with a nominal capacity of 200 kWh to 500 kWh. The companys proprietary suite of software, hardware and diagnostics is guaranteed performance for stationary storage, serving enterprise and utility customers.
“We realized early on that the only way to develop a real market for this type of technology was to be able to guarantee performance,” says Mike Ferry, president of Smartville. “We validated our technology with battery modules obtained by disassembling electric vehicle battery packs, and cycled modules of different chemistries from different car manufacturers. As a result, we now have software and hardware that can use batteries of different health states within the same system, and we are able to improve overall system health over time.”
Ferry said that Smartville sees benefits in focusing on reusing battery packs, rather than disassembling and reusing battery modules. According to the company, labor and disassembly costs are prohibitive when it comes to megawatt-hours or gigawatt-hours.
Smartville will use Department of Energy funds to accelerate the commercialization of its reuse product. The company first plans to obtain UL certification (a quality standard provided by private company Underwriters Laboratories) for the technology, followed by a 4 MWh demonstration project. The pilot project will locate the repurposed battery with an existing power plant in central California, in an identified disadvantaged community.
Smartville was launched at the University of California, San Diego with a $2 million public loan through the Agency for Advanced Energy Research Projects program. The company says it will install another prototype system by the end of the second quarter with Southern Power. Although Smartville has other projects in the initial phase, next year it will focus on certification, commercialization and the expansion of its production. |
