Nissan Finds a Second Use For Old LEAF Batteries (slashgear.com) 59
An anonymous reader quotes a report from SlashGear: Nissan has found a second-life for old LEAF batteries inside mobile machines that help workers at Nissan factories worldwide. The old batteries are being used in automated guided vehicles or AGVs used for various tasks inside the manufacturing facilities, including delivering parts to workers on the assembly line.
AGVs are used as robotic mail carriers operating on magnetic tracks taking mail and parts exactly where they're needed on the assembly line. The idea is to use the AGV to deliver parts so the worker doesn't waste time searching for a component and can stay focused on installing parts. Nissan and other automotive manufacturers have found that AGVs are indispensable when it comes to saving time and increasing productivity on the assembly line. Nissan currently operates more than 4000 AGVs around the world at its various manufacturing facilities. The factories have a system that includes 30-second automatic quick charging to keep battery packs on the electric vehicles topped off and working correctly. AGVs also have sensors that keep them operating on a set route and allow them to stop when needed. They also have wireless communications capabilities that enable them to communicate with each other to avoid collisions.
Nissan says that it has been exploring ways to reuse old LEAF batteries since 2010. The first-generation LEAF used a 24-kilowatt hour battery pack made by combining 48 modules. Nissan said eight years ago, its engineers discovered a way to take three of those modules and repackage them to fit inside the AGV. Last year, the engineers began to repurpose used battery modules instead of using new ones to power the AGVs. The team also found the repurposed LEAF batteries last a lot longer thanks to their lithium-ion design compared to the lead-acid batteries used previously.
AGVs are used as robotic mail carriers operating on magnetic tracks taking mail and parts exactly where they're needed on the assembly line. The idea is to use the AGV to deliver parts so the worker doesn't waste time searching for a component and can stay focused on installing parts. Nissan and other automotive manufacturers have found that AGVs are indispensable when it comes to saving time and increasing productivity on the assembly line. Nissan currently operates more than 4000 AGVs around the world at its various manufacturing facilities. The factories have a system that includes 30-second automatic quick charging to keep battery packs on the electric vehicles topped off and working correctly. AGVs also have sensors that keep them operating on a set route and allow them to stop when needed. They also have wireless communications capabilities that enable them to communicate with each other to avoid collisions.
Nissan says that it has been exploring ways to reuse old LEAF batteries since 2010. The first-generation LEAF used a 24-kilowatt hour battery pack made by combining 48 modules. Nissan said eight years ago, its engineers discovered a way to take three of those modules and repackage them to fit inside the AGV. Last year, the engineers began to repurpose used battery modules instead of using new ones to power the AGVs. The team also found the repurposed LEAF batteries last a lot longer thanks to their lithium-ion design compared to the lead-acid batteries used previously.
all we need now... (Score:2)
... is a factory of robots that make factories that make robots that make anything. Six months later we all drown in grey goo.
Re: all we need now... (Score:1)
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That explains it (Score:2)
The supply of used leaf batteries has diminished significantly
Bummer for me, bully for them
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Tesla could end up doing the same thing.
Re:That explains it (Score:5, Informative)
Tesla could end up doing the same thing.
Tesla is already designing to do the same sort of thing, but on a vaster scale. The announced plans are to have battery packs that last about 1.2 million miles of car operation (i.e. the life of a REALLY long-life car) with something like 90% of rated capacity remaining when the car is retired. Then the pack would be used for less demanding energy storage - like grid or home time-shift storage for renewable energy - for another couple "million miles worth", i.e. maybe a decade or two (depending on how much it gets cyced).
Eventually it would be recycled, hopefully by stripping it down to its component raw materials and rebuilt into new batteries. (Companies are already starting to do this with retired earlier model car batteries and manufacturing rejects, now that there are enough of them to make it worthwhile to set up a plant to do the work.)
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Problem is all this stuff has a cost associated with it. As we have seen battery tech is very price sensitive, which is why nobody else buys Tesla batteries but instead get them from Korea or China where the focus is on balancing all factors like cost, performance, charge time, size and weight.
90% after 1.2 million miles seems silly. The cost/benefit ratio is likely to be low.
Another problem - Elon's "plans" (Score:2)
> Problem is all this stuff has a cost associated with it.
> 90% after 1.2 million miles seems silly. The cost/benefit ratio is likely to be low.
That's a very good point. Another problem is that GP is talking about what Elon Musk plans to do. Musk plans on having fully autonomous cars driving themselves across the country by - several years ago. I'm pretty sure he planned to be chilling on Mars by now.
Musk makes a lot of grandiose "plans", which isn't a bad thing.
It's been said "shot for the moon -
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For the most part, though, his good dreams do come to reality, just far late. Sure, some of the dreams turn out to be bad ideas and never come to fruition, but we *do* have Tesla cars that *almost* are driverless, and he's absolutely pushed the entire world towards a self-driving electric car future. He's also in the process of building
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Musk has outperformed all US automakers as well as NASA. The fact that it's taken him this long to become the world's richest man is a consequence of all the industries he's disrupted spreading lies and crying to congress. Starlink is about to lay god's own lightning on Verizon and Comcast's profit margin.
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What happened to Tesla's plan for a $35k car? They missed the target and now seem to have forgotten about it entirely.
I remember when it was all about how they were going to push battery prices down, but then several other vendors zoomed past them and they seemed to lose interest.
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The supply of used leaf batteries has diminished significantly.
Hooray for Nissan.
Still, I wonder what fraction of the retired batteries they will be able to use in this way, for how long, and what happens to them when they're too old and tired for even this service.
Running the numbers... (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder what fraction of the retired batteries they will be able to use in this way, ...
So I ran the numbers:
- A Leaf has 48 modules.
- An AGV uses 3 modules.
- So one Leaf's battery can be rehacked to power 16 AGVs.
- They're using 4,000 AGVs.
- So converting them all (and not adding any more) recycles the batterys from 250 Leaf cars.
- Nissan has built over 500,000 Leafs.
- So converting all their current AGVs would recycle 0.05% of the fleet's batteries.
It's a start.
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I'm just trying to figure out how news that an EV company has figured out that Batteries are Batteries and can be used more than one way is news worthy....
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Why recycle when you can repurpose? Finding a new use for a thing as-is is infinitely preferable to breaking that thing down to raw materials and making something new out of that.
Most EV manufacturers have end-of-life strategies on the books for their vehicle's batteries, usually centered around stationary storage to support renewable energy. It's the most obvious thing in the world to do. So the batteries that were built 10 years ago are just now finding new life serving a different market, and it will pro
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I don't think all the retired batteries have gone into these things, I just think that now that they're planning to use them they are stocking up on them.
You wouldn't want to store lots of them ahead of time because you have to keep them topped up...
Re: Running the numbers... (Score:3)
Technology is evolving all the time, they have drop in electric rear axels now for old muscle cars/ pickups, all you need is batteries, if I wanted a fun project, I would pick up 2 used Leaf batteries and have a ball!
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Where can I buy a drop-in electric rear axle?
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While I've seen reports for these, they're *not* consumer grade.
The target is high-end "resto-mod" classic cars.
Maybe someday, but for the moment, that make factory crate engines look *cheap*.
I don't think they're down to $25k, and maybe not half of that . . .
When I see such an article, I follow it, because I expect gasoline to become unavailable long before the kids take my keys from me.
Even so, I probably couldn't get one for my 72 Eldorado Convertible--I can't even get an overdrive transmission for it! (
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I wonder if they'd be good enough for data-closet UPS use. Most of those UPSes are more there for surge/overvoltage/undervoltage protection and to keep equipment up over 1-15 minute service disruptions than they are there for extended runtime uses... people don't usually remain in office buildings during extended power outages.
The major UPS industry vendors seem stuck on lead-acid with no signs of adopting any other chemistry. I'd love to not have to replace those batteries as often as I do now, though I'
Leaf Batteries die fast (Score:1)
I've heard that Leaf batteries die fast, within a few years, because Nissan doesn't cool the batteries at all. All they need is a temp sensor and a fan, but they didn't think it's necessary. Planned obsolescence indeed!
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Die fast relative to other electric cars. The vast majority of Leafs from the original 2011-2014 model are still running relatively happily on the original battery.
A fan and a temperature sensor would not have helped significantly, proper battery cooling requires liquid. Liquid cooling systems cost money and development time, all to save a 24kWh battery that is obsolete after 10 years anyway.
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I've heard that Leaf batteries die fast, within a few years, because Nissan doesn't cool the batteries at all. All they need is a temp sensor and a fan, but they didn't think it's necessary. Planned obsolescence indeed!
It depends. I have a 2015 Leaf that has yet to lose a single bar of capacity. The batteries were after a battery chemistry change that happened shortly before it was manufactured. Those batteries are holding up much better.
That doesn't let Nissan off the hook for not providing modern tech battery upgrade options for Leafs that do have battery degradation.
Demonstration of the "greenness" of electric cars (Score:3, Informative)
As a matter of fact, the recycling and dismantling of electric vehicles is abysmal. The dismantling itself cannot be done at most car dismantlers, because they do not have the certifications and equipment to handle lithium batteries. Once dismantled the batteries at present are just stored. The number of battery recycling factories for Lithium batteries for the whole of the Eu is in single digits and there is no transport logistics to ship to them what is effectively "densely packed explosives".
So much for the whole thing being green. It is "green" - with quotes.
Re: Demonstration of the "greenness" of electric c (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Demonstration of the "greenness" of electric ca (Score:5, Interesting)
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Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.. its technically the second R. But the original poster is correct with regard to the intentionally ignored problem. The venue for this Reuse is extremely limited in scale. 4000 to be very exact. When selling a few hundred thousand cars, 4000 one-time Reuse projects wont exactly put a big dent into a growing problem that was entirely foreseeable, with little planning to address the issue at onset. Its not just cars, its everything using Li-ION power cells. Its a significant enough of
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Re:Demonstration of the "greenness" of electric ca (Score:5, Informative)
Used Nissan Leafs hold their value because no matter how knackered the rest of the car is the battery will have a lot of useful capacity left over.
An original 24kWh Leaf battery can be split out into 4-5 home batteries for storing solar or cheap off-peak energy, even if they have quite significant degradation. They are popular with DIYers and you can fine plenty being sold on eBay.
People also use them to increase the range of old Leafs. The BMS is smart enough to allow extra cells to simply be connected to the car and work without any hacks or messing around.
I don't know who is storing them, that's crazy. They are worth thousands of Euros on the used market. The Leaf ones are very easy to remove and dismantle.
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They really don't hold their value though.
Here is a recent list of completed eBay sales:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.htm... [ebay.com]
The least expensive of which sold for $2500.
Meanwhile, replacement battery packs are currently selling for between $3500 and $5000
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For some reason they are cheaper in the US. Used ones in Europe sell for a lot more, usually around 5000 Euro for an early model with significant battery degradation.
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To my knowledge, lithium-batteries have never been recycled back to battery-grade lithium on any significant scale.
It's easier and cheaper to just mine more pure lithium.
Dismantling, handling, re-using and recycling them already has hazards associated with it anyway, and it's just not profitable.
It's always been that way. People just don't understand that and buy into the "this is environmentally-friendly" hype with zero evidence.
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Re:Demonstration of the "greenness" of electric ca (Score:4, Insightful)
"Recycling lithium from EV batteries isn't financially profitable yet, but a Bloomberg report shows that this will change in the next few years," Bandyopadhyay says. The main reason for the current low profitability is that the volumes are still so small. EV batteries normally have a lifetime of around 10 years, which means that the vast majority of these batteries still work. But in a few years there will be enough electric cars that the number of used batteries in Norway will rise sharply. Then there will also be more money in recycling. It's important to get the technology and equipment in place before that time."
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-lithium-recycled.html [phys.org]
And this: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/batteries-storage/lithiumion-battery-recycling-finally-takes-off-in-north-america-and-europe [ieee.org]
The world is changing. Please try to keep up.
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You mean the world "may change in the next few years if Bloomberg are right".
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We've had the tech to do it for ten years.
More.
We don't.
You can't make something unprofitable magically become profitable just by introducing more of it.
If it's cheaper to dig up 1 ton than recycle 1 ton, it's not at all certain that it will be cheaper to recycle 100 tons than dig up 100 tons.
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The batteries are in cars that have already been sold. They're already in the system. They will need to be recycled at some point, even if we've moved on to different materials. And that's when the necessary volume part of the profit equation kicks in.
What part of "it's baked in" don't you understand?
Re:Demonstration of the "greenness" of electric ca (Score:4, Insightful)
> Using a couple of batteries from your electric vehicles in a factory line is not a viable recycling strategy.
As other replies point out, this isn't recycling, it's repurposing. The key difference is there's little or no energy expenditure in repurposing a used-but-still-usable battery module for a new task, and it's a 100% reduction in new materials that would otherwise have been needed for that application.
Keep in mind that when an EV batteriy is "dead" what that really means is capacity has reduced to less than ~80% of new. This doesn't mean the battery is useless, and we know from the past decade of EV owner's behavior that it doesn't even mean the battery will be replaced.
Nissan envisioned repurposing their battery modules from day one. I remember the earliest discussions being about building stationary power storage for grid/renewable applications using salvaged EV modules. That has yet to happen, because apparently the batteries aren't getting replaced nearly as much as it was anticipated.
> The dismantling itself cannot be done at most car dismantlers, because they do not have the certifications and equipment to handle lithium batteries
Well, there's a very easy fix for that...
> Once dismantled the batteries at present are just stored.
There is a HUGE aftermarket for used EV battery packs and modules, for applications ranging from DIY home battery storage to professional EV conversions. If you have a used battery module that isn't completely fried you should have no trouble finding someone to buy it. There are no dismantled batteries just sitting around gathering dust.
> The number of battery recycling factories for Lithium batteries for the whole of the Eu is in single digits
Per above, there are so few lithium battery recyclers because there are so few lithium batteries to be recycled. If you want to bitch and moan about it, go complain to the companies that manufacture products with intentionally disposable lithium batteries.
> and there is no transport logistics to ship to them what is effectively "densely packed explosives" ...then how do the batteries get from the battery factories to the car factories? I think shipping large quantities of lithium batteries is a solved problem, and we both know more hazardous materials are shipped without hesitation. Nobody bats an eye when they're driving next to a truck hauling 10,000 gallons of gasoline at 70MPH. Hell any schlub can legally load their pickup truck with up to half a ton of liquid propane and not even need more than a standard class D license.
=Smidge=
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If "we're not there yet" is an argument for not starting, we'll never get anywhere.
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Using a couple of batteries from your electric vehicles in a factory line is not a viable recycling strategy.
Glass half full vs glass half empty. This is a step in the right direction.
So much for recycling EV batteries. (Score:2)
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You can keep posting the same rant, but nobody cares.
Website operators have to combat spam and attacks, and spam and attacks come from bad-reputation anonymised sources like you're no-doubt using (e.g. VPNs, Tor, etc.).
Even Bittorrent swarms and trackers are just blocking such addresses because they're just sources of DoS attacks, etc.
All you're doing is drawing more attention to yourself and making your own life difficult, especially on the banking side.
Stop trying to do business on the Internet if you can
Small reuse percentage (Score:2)
Goodbye cheap batteries. (Score:2)
I used the old leaf batteries for my solar setup. They are a good value, the only better ones come from chevy evs. Now I guess Nissan has come to the same conclusion and is taking their batteries back.
Have fingers crossed for those other recently recalled batteries hitting the market. This is the problem with renewables, they are hard to store.
I hear (Score:1)
I hear that the batteries make an excellent doorstop.