Edit: I could not find anything yet.
Anybody with piles of batteries like that needs a very powerful sprinkler system. Lithium battery fires at recycling centers have become a major problem, even with only a few lithium batteries. Search "lithium battery recycling fire".
There are deluge systems that can cope with battery fires. They're simple, but need a big water supply.
Contrary to the popular belief, lithium batteries do NOT contain enough oxygen to just keep self-burning. Most of the lithium-ion pyrotechnics is just from good old atmospheric oxygen, which oxidizes the organic electrolyte.
What lithium-ion batteries have is the ignition source that basically keeps going on and on. So once you extinguish the burning electrolyte, it just keeps reigniting.
Cuz I know in San Diego a lithium battery recycling project just cleared government inspection to shred and recycle batteries at ANY SoC, which is a major improvement vs most any other li-ion recycling facility which needs those batteries drained as much as possible before recycling begins.
I can imagine that it could be, having to grab thousands of batteries and figure out where their leads are. Is that the issue, or is there something else?
I think it would make more sense to reuse them:
1) use them in a car for 10 years
2) then pull them out then use them in a home for 10 more years
Recycling the batteries instead of #2 seems to me like recycling last years CPUs and GPUs for the silicon content.
or alternatively, it seems like grinding up lease return vehicles to be "green" (and conveniently get rid of the secondary market for used vehicles)
all batteries should be roughly on equal level of charge, so that the whole unit performs optimally and doesn't cause issues (like catching a fire and burning down your house)
An interesting aspect with degraded EV batteries is that there's still plenty of life left in them. Also, they last longer if you limit their power output, charging speeds and cool them properly.
The batteries don't actually get recycled until they stop working. They have a few gwh of battery storage made out of repurposed EV batteries and a facility that processes expended cells to recover all sorts of materials. A lot of what they do boils down to inspecting and monitoring packs and cells and interfacing with existing battery management solutions.
Apparently, they are recovering a lot of material and selling it back to battery manufacturers already. Both the storage business and the material selling business have the potential to generate nice amounts of revenue.
The main limitation for growing the business isn't technical but the fact that there simply aren't that many batteries yet to recycle. It will be some years before supply of end of life EVs and batteries starts ramping up. And years more before their batteries stop being useful for storage. A lot of the batteries they process are discarded during the production process.
So its nice the US has a competitor here
I certainly did flag this one, it starts with an egregiously stupid AI "illustration" of the plant, and ends with "This article is based on verified sources and supported by editorial technologies", aka an AI wrote this.
Low-effort, full of inaccuracies = get that out of my sight, please.
dcrazy•5mo ago
> This article is based on verified sources and supported by editorial technologies.
Is there perhaps any other news about this plant or process, maybe with additional context on what will determine the market viability of their approach?
promiseofbeans•5mo ago
perihelions•5mo ago
https://www.energy-reporters.com/meet-the-team/
To randomly pick one of those thousands: on the reputable e-commerce site Amazon.com, "Rosemary Potter" sells LLM-generated cookbooks under the nom de plume "Samantha Green":
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B086FTC9NJ/about
Just how deep are we, exactly, in the dead-internet world?