It is a very popular question and one that many users who consider electrified vehicles ask themselves: what will happen to the batteries of electric cars once they reach the end of its useful life? Very easy. Reuse them, not recycle them. A solution that has very important nuances for the future.
A project to give them a second life
The battery is the most important element of any electric vehicle. The core, the heart. It is what makes the car work, gives it autonomy and largely determines its initial price. This has been done because many manufacturers are increasingly looking for new methods and technologies to find more technological and efficient techniques.
This is always on the way to improving both its quality, its useful life, as well as increasing its autonomy. At the moment, however, it is something that still weighs a lot if we look at its contrast with the cost of manufacture and consequently the increase of the final product. But also in its chemical composition, in how it will affect the environment.
Yes; It is generally said that the electric car is a zero emissions and a sustainable and ecological vehicle. However, there are certain doubts in this regard for these units, especially in what has to do when they reach the end of their useful life, or are exhausted.
Given this, several countries are promoting various solutions for the future in this regard. The one that is more advanced is France together with Germany. And Spain, which is not far behind, has wanted to promote a project that aims to reuse the batteries of electric vehicles to give them a second life, a second use beyond the automobile. It is the RETEBAVE (Technical Recycling of Electric Vehicle Batteries).
What does it consist of
As we have mentioned, the so-called RETEBAVE is a Spanish project with which, initially, it was sought to analyze the viability of recycling facilities and their industrial scaling. Now, once it has been confirmed that indeed electric car batteries can reused in other sectors, as is the case with renewable energies, the plan has been given free rein.
The project aimed to characterize the second use that can be given to batteries, and if they are totally discarded, because they have reached the end of their useful life, recycle them in a safe, sustainable and automated. It was about developing a project that would study “an industrial process to automate and digitize the recycling of batteries or their second use,” as Enrique Vacas, CEO of Nutai, has explained.
The team in charge of this research is in the ITE, the Technological Institute of Energy. There it is explained that, at present, diagnostic tools for evaluating the state of electric vehicle batteries are relegated to the maintenance or research sector. In any case, this second phase would include numerous technologies such as process automation, IoT, data analysis, deeplearning, energy analysis, application of energy sustainability techniques, among others.
It will reduce the cost of manufacturing
In this way, if the manufacturing cost of the batteries is reduced thanks to the reuse of the already used ones, this would allow lower manufacturing cost of electric vehicles to help meet electrification goals.
The truth is that when an electric vehicle battery is reaching the end of its useful life in it, it can still have a second life in alternative applications. Another option is to recycle your chemical components to return them to introduce as raw materials in the production process.
Unlike those used in consumer electronics, batteries removed from electric vehicles still retain between 70 and 80% of their initial capacity. Although with that percentage they no longer meet the minimum requirements for use in an electric vehicle, they could still provide enough capacity to less demanding applications, such as stationary energy storage.