80% could indeed be plenty of usable life for your EV use cases, but it strongly depends on usage patterns. More degradation means more trips to the charger on a road trip. It means trips that you’d regularly make just charging at home at the end of day now require you to plug in at the destination too. It means more range anxiety as a whole.
Only if the feed in is a bottleneck. For peak shaving you could go faster.
Yes
is it profitable? probably not.
Looking at the price for brid battery storage, and its dropping precipitously. The cost isn't as much in the batteries them selves, it packaging, placing and then controlling them.
For example if you want to have a 200Mwhr 100Mw storage site, you'll need to place it, join it to the grid, all doable. Then you need the switch gear to make it work as you want it to.
For day ahead, 30 minute trading, thats fairly simple.
For grid stabilisation, thats a bit harder, you need to be able to lead/match/lag the grid frequency by n degrees instantaneously. which is trivial at a few kw, much harder at 100Mw
is not a concern, double the technologie in the same space?
"In many PHEV systems, there are different modes:
Electric mode (EV mode): The vehicle runs purely on the electric motor(s) and battery until the battery depletes to some extent.
Hybrid/Parallel mode: Both the petrol engine and electric motor(s) work together to drive the wheels, especially under high load, higher speeds or when battery is low. Ithy
Series mode (in some designs): The petrol engine acts only as a generator to charge the battery or power the electric motor(s), and the wheels are driven by the electric motor(s).
For the BYD Leopard 5 (and many BYD PHEVs) the petrol engine can drive the wheels (i.e., it is not purely a generator). It is part of the drive system, especially when high power or long range is needed.
At the same time, it likely can assist with charging the battery or maintaining battery state of charge (SOC) when needed (for example, to keep the battery at some reserve level or in “save” mode). User-reports show that the petrol engine will kick in to support the electric system, charge the battery, or assist the drive under certain conditions" -
The engine in a hybrid should live an easier life compared to an ICE. No extended idle, mostly running in the power band, etc. There are lots of different ways to setup the hybrid system, but typically, rather than a small stater motor, you have a larger motor/generator that also starts the engine; it's less likely to get worn out, because it's built for continuous use.
In my PHEV, it has a 'toyota synergy' style 'e-CVT' which eliminates gear selection and should be very low maintenance (although mine had to be replaced under a service bulletin due to bearing failure because of manufacturing error) again nicer than an ICE. But some hybrids have a more traditional transmission.
Certainly, you can do ICE only or EV only, but there's a lot of room to use the ICE for things it's good for, and the EV for things it's good for, and blend where there's overlap.
Considering how expensive residential batteries are and how quickly EVs depreciate, I think soon it'll be cheaper to get a used EV as a cheap source of cells that accidentally happens to be able to drive itself around.
Imo V2G, and V2H is unnecessary and add too much complication, I think for the future, solar inverters already have the necessary hardware and certifications to be able to take power and safely connect to the grid - something that requires different hardware and standards compliance in basically every country (yes even within the EU).
1. Does the solar inverter do away with the need for a V2G or V2H unit?
2. What are the limitations vs a dedicated V2G/H unit?
3. Is generator input on your solar inverter a common feature across inverters?
2. Tbh not super familiar with V2G/V2H, other than it being super expensive for both the wall box and the car (only high end models tend to support it)/
3. No idea, but it's not a high end feature, I wouldn't count on any inverter to just have it, but if you're looking to buy one that does, I don't think you'll be breaking the bank.
Imo the future is for solar inverters to offer a dedicated DC car charger port, as once again all the hardware is already in there.
As long as the inverter can also provide charging this definitely has some potential.
My first 14.3 kWh pack cost about 2800$ DDP from China, delivered 03/2023. For that one I did calculate how long it took for amortization, which I projected at about 5 years.
The second, identical pack was delivered 08/2024 and cost 2000$ DDP. Since we got an EV that's drawing about 14kWh per day, I didn't bother doing the math and just ordered it.
These are 280Ah 16S 51.6V packs, based on the EVE LF280K. In an enclosure, with a BMS (Seplos, 200A) and a dedicated balancer. They are good for 6000 cycles at 140A or less [each]. Mind these were both part of small bulk orders - I think each time we ordered 6 to 8 of these, which reduced shipping costs.
Again batteries are an energy store and not an energy source. The fact the author cannot distinguish that makes the their opinion less credible.
The economics are interesting though. New grid storage batteries cost around $200-300/kWh, while second-life EV batteries can be acquired for $50-100/kWh. However, you need to factor in significant integration costs (~$50-75/kWh) to build compatible BMS systems and thermal management. We also found cycle life degrades about 20% faster in repurposed packs compared to new ones, likely due to accumulated stress patterns from automotive use.
Has anyone here successfully integrated mixed second-life batteries at scale? I'm particularly curious about how you handled thermal management across different pack designs while maintaining safe operating parameters.
bryanlarsen•3h ago
If EV batteries last 20+ years in EV's, it'll be > 2040 before there are significant numbers of EV batteries available to recycle or reuse.
https://www.geotab.com/blog/ev-battery-health/
jeffbee•3h ago
pfdietz•3h ago
Rebelgecko•2h ago
jeffbee•2h ago
hnaccount_rng•2h ago
pfdietz•1h ago
Low cost modules allow one to do away with things like optimally tilted modules and single axis tracking. The modules can also be tightly packed, reducing mounting and wiring costs.
hinkley•41m ago
ericd•13m ago
duskwuff•1h ago
(Asking because I genuinely don't know, not because I have a specific answer in mind.)
hinkley•40m ago
dylan604•3h ago
David Roberts
When did automotive batteries become the majority of your input by volume?
Colin Campbell
That is a good question.
David Roberts
Was it recent or was that early on?
Colin Campbell
I would say the transition to EV batteries dominating what we received, it’s been in the last year or 18 months.
David Roberts
So the front edge of a very large wave of batteries has begun to arrive?
Colin Campbell
Yeah, the wave is out there, it’s coming. The waters have finally started to arrive at the beach here.
bryanlarsen•3h ago
dylan604•3h ago
Sure, so while not supplying power to a city, they are proving this is viable. Just because it's not "turn off the coal plants now" moment doesn't mean this isn't a very good direction. Everyone has to start and grow. I don't understand the whole shit on something because it's not an immediate solve. If these guys waited until 2040 to start the business, well, that'd just be dumb. It essentially sounds like capacity will just continue to increase year over year, maybe around 2040 there will be a huge spike. Doesn't seem like anything is wrong here.
jeffbee•3h ago
dylan604•3h ago
ACCount37•3h ago
When EVs with good battery pack engineering started hitting the streets, they outperformed those early projections by a lot. And by now, it's getting clear that battery pack isn't as much of a concern - with some of the better designs, like in early Teslas, losing about 5-15% of their capacity over a decade of use.
cogman10•2h ago
LiPo batteries were quiet expensive when it was initially released. NiMH was really the only option in town.
And with a lower energy density battery that's also heavier, adding a cooling system would have also added a bunch of weight to the already heavy car with a barely usable range of 100 miles.
Gen 2, however, had no excuses. They had every opportunity to add active cooling and they still decided to go with just air cooling.
wcfields•2h ago
londons_explore•1h ago
I use it in my driveway to make it look to thieves like someone is home (round me, houses with no car get broken into).
MrRadar•2h ago
Edit: Checking Wikipedia to verify my information, I found out that Nissan actually sold a lithium-battery EV in 1997 to comply with the same 90s CARB zero-emissions vehicle mandate that gave us the GM EV-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_R%27nessa#Nissan_Altra
formerly_proven•1h ago
numpad0•8m ago
Even just looking at online media reports[2][3] clearly sourced from some exact same press event, it is obvious that US English equivalents are much lighter in content than Japanese versions. They're putting the information out, no one's reading it. It's just been the types of information that didn't drive clicks. Language barrier would have effects on it too, that Toyota is a Japanese company and US is an export market, but it's fundamentally the same phenomenon as citizen facing government reports that never gets read and often imagined as being "hidden and withheld from public eyes", just a communication issue.
1: https://www.toyota.com/priuspluginhybrid/features/mpg_other_...
2: https://www.motortrend.com/news/toyota-aqua-prius-c-hybrid-b...
3: https://car.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/1339263.html
ACCount37•1h ago
xattt•22m ago
floxy•1h ago
https://coolienergy.com/lfp-vs-nmc-batteries-the-science-beh...
jbm•1m ago
We had this article from Elektrek [1] about battery issues in South Korea. When I asked my local electric maintenance shop [2, sorry for the FB link], they said they have started seeing the same issue in Model 3s and Ys in Canada as well. (They also said that it is too early to tell how common it would become)
This may bode well for recycling since the issues is an unbalance, not the whole pack failing.
[1] https://electrek.co/2025/10/14/tesla-is-at-risk-of-lossing-s...
[2] https://www.facebook.com/groups/albertaEV/posts/248558844207...
whatever1•3h ago
cogman10•2h ago
bryanlarsen•1h ago
there are exceptions, though.
p1necone•2h ago
"most people" even now are just parroting dumb FUD they read on facebook. You really shouldn't give any weight to the opinions of laypeople on topics that are as heavily propagandized and politically charged as renewable energy.
p0w3n3d•2h ago
stetrain•2h ago
Tesla has an 8-year battery and drivetrain warranty but they don't necessarily fail after that date.
trhway•2h ago
Sohcahtoa82•1h ago
JohnLocke4•2h ago
epistasis•2h ago
And already, solar plus storage is cheaper than new nuclear. And solar and storage are getting cheaper at a tremendous rate.
It's hard to imagine a scenario where fusion could ever catch up to solar and storage technology. It may be useful in places with poor solar resources, like fission is now, but that's a very very long time from now.
noosphr•1h ago
The AI arms race, which has become an actual arms race in the war in Ukraine, needs endless energy all times a day.
China is already winning the AI cold war because it adds more capacity to its grid a year than Germany has in a century.
If we keep going with agrarian methods of energy production don't be surprised that we suffer the same fate as the agrarian societies of the 19th century. Any country that doesn't have the capability to train and build drones on mass won't be a country for long.
epistasis•1h ago
China is winning the AI Cold war because it's adding solar, storage, and wind at orders of magnitude more than nuclear.
I'm not sure who's doing your supposed "envisioning" but there is no vision for cheap abundant energy from fusion. Solar and storage deliver it today, fusion only delivers it in sci fi books.
Nuclear is 20th century technology that does not fit with a highly automated future. With high levels of automation, construction is super expensive. You want to spend your expensive construction labor on building factories, not individual power generation sites.
Building factories for solar and storage lets them scale to a degree that nuclear could never scale. Nuclear has basically no way of catching up.
pfdietz•1h ago
I blame these for the unquestioned belief that fusion is desirable. It's a trope because it enables stories to be told, and because readers became used to seeing, not because science fiction has a good track record on such things.
The fact that the volumetric power density of ARC is 40x worse than a PWR (and ITER, 400x worse!) should tell one that DT fusion at least is unlikely to be cheap.
With continued progress down the experience curve, PV will reach the point where resistive heat is cheaper than burning natural gas at the Henry Hub price (which doesn't include the cost of getting gas through pipelines and distribution to customers.) And remember cheap natural gas was what destroyed the last nuclear renaissance in the US.
formerly_proven•1h ago
Okay, sure, burning lignite and using the exhaust as air heating in the children's hospital. You got me.
noosphr•1h ago
Solar and wind capacity had shot through the roof in the last five years because they can't sell hardware to the west any more.
The other big item is hydro power, which China has a ton of untapped potential for. Unfortunately for the West every good river has already been damed so we can't follow them there.
epistasis•1h ago
"can't sell hardware??" hah! I've never heard that weird made-up justification, where did you pick it up from?
China installed 277GW of solar in 2024, capacity factor corrected that's 55.4 GW of solar power. That's equivalent to the entire amount of nuclear that China has ever built. One year versus all time. And then in the first half of 2025, China installed another 212GW of solar. In six months.
Nuclear is a footnote compared to the planned deployment of solar and wind and storage in China.
Anybody who's serious about energy is deploying massive amounts of solar, storage, and some wind. Some people that are slow to adapt are still building gas or coal, but these will be stranded assets far before their end of life. Nuclear fusion and fission are meme technologies, unable to compete with the scale and scope that batteries and solar deliver every day. This mismatch grows by the month.
Dylan16807•1h ago
But I agree that it doesn't look like fusion is going to be cheap any time soon.
apendleton•46m ago
Maybe, but not necessarily. The necessary breakthrough might have been high-temperature superconducting magnets, in which case not only has it been imagined, but it has already occurred, and we're just waiting for the engineering atop that breakthrough to progress enough to demonstrate a working prototype (the magnets have been demonstrated but a complete reactor using them hasn't yet).
Or it might be that the attempts at building such a prototype don't pan out, and some other breakthrough is indeed needed. It'll probably be a couple of years until we know for sure, but at this point I don't think there's enough data to say one way or the other.
> And already, solar plus storage is cheaper than new nuclear.
It depends how much storage you mean. If you're only worried about sub-24h load-shifting (like, enough to handle a day/night cycle on a sunny day), this is certainly true. If you care about having enough to cover for extended bad weather, or worse yet, for seasonal load-shifting (banking power in the summer to cover the winter), the economics of solar plus storage remain abysmal: the additional batteries you need cost just as much as the ones you needed for daily coverage, but get cycled way less and so are much harder to pay for. If the plan is to use solar and storage for _all generation_, though, that's the number that matters. Comparing LCoE of solar plus daily storage with the LCoE of fixed-firm or on-demand generation is apples-and-oranges.
I think solar plus storage absolutely has the potential to get there, but that too will likely require fundamental breakthroughs (probably in the form of much cheaper storage: perhaps something like Form Energy's iron-air batteries).
pfdietz•16m ago
With HTSC magnets, a tokamak much smaller than ITER could be built, but ITER is so horrifically bad that one can be much better than it and still be impractical.
BurningFrog•43m ago
bee_rider•2h ago
hinkley•43m ago
megaman821•1m ago
JumpCrisscross•12m ago
Redwood pitched recycling. But its principal business was primary production. (Processed black mass is analogous to lithium ore.) They're struggling because demand for American-made batteries remains low.