I've had that thought as well. There has to be a market for that kind of thing.
“I’ve had that thought as well. There has to be a market for that kind of thing.”
Tesla PowerWall.
Second life batteries such as those you (and politicians) think are suitable to store “green energy” are very problematic.
Due to temperature fluctuations and charge/discharge degradation to the internal chemistry of each individual cell this is incredibly risky business. The “owner” of an EV would not pay up to half the price of a new vehicle to replace a “good battery”. Very few people understand that these batteries cannot last forever the way we use them.
They have an ideal temperature range for use and function best under slow discharge and charging. If you kept the cell at the ideal temperature and babied it they could last for a really long time (nobody knows for sure how long).
However, we don’t use them that way so I remain very skeptical that this “second life” usage to store solar or wind power is a good statistical risk. Few people understand how these really work but putting 40 old EV packs in a metal container means the statistical chance of failure increases by a factor of 40 (in simple terms) and all the damage that occurred in the first life for any of those 40 previously separate battery packs increases the odds of some minuscule internal problem within a single cell or the same on the electrical connections for one pack among 40 and its game over.
Just my .02