Batteries on site at a data centre on Redwood Materials' campus in Sparks, Nevada - Bloomberg
Sparks (Nevada): Battery recycling company Redwood Materials Inc has launched what it says is the largest deployment of reused batteries globally.
They’re powering a data centre operated by Crusoe, a member of OpenAI’s Project Stargate.
Demand for clean, reliable power is increasing, spurred by the rise of data centres powering artificial intelligence (AI).
Grid-scale batteries are key to fulfilling this demand and supporting intermittent renewables.
The 2,000-GPU data centre is located on Redwood’s Sparks, Nevada, campus, where the firm runs a large battery recycling operation.
The storage system uses hundreds of repurposed electric vehicle (EV) batteries, according to Cal Lankton, the company’s chief commercial officer.
Solar panels help provide electricity for a system with 12 megawatts of power and 63 megawatt-hours of capacity. That’s enough to power about 9,000 homes. The system is the largest microgrid in North America, according to Redwood.
Redwood founder and chief executive officer J B Straubel said in an interview on Bloomberg TV last Thursday that the company is “aiming at projects that are 20 to 100 times larger than this” for its next deployments. “There’s a lot to come in the pipeline,” Straubel said.
Data centres are putting a greater strain on the grid. A new BloombergNEF report published last Wednesday found that their energy demand last year was equal to 1.4% of global supply. Nearly half of all data centre capacity is in the United States.
Founded in 2017 by Straubel, who also co-founded Tesla Inc, Redwood recycles, refines and produces battery materials and is one of the biggest battery recyclers in North America.
The end-of-life EV packs and modules it takes in are no longer suitable for transportation due to demand for greater range and better battery health.
But they’re still usable for grid-scale storage, Lankton said, which will be the focus of its new division dubbed Redwood Energy.
“Think of this almost like a retirement home for these batteries,” Lankton said of the new installation.
He added that Redwood’s reused batteries are half the cost of new lithium-ion systems but offer the same performance.
That’s possible, he said, because stationary storage is less hard on the batteries than powering an EV.
When paired with renewable energy sources like wind and solar, stationary energy storage systems help stabilise the grid while reducing costs by smoothing out fluctuations in power demand.
Redwood generated about US$200mil in revenue last year through its recycling operations, and Lankton said the company expects a “meaningful increase in revenue in the back half of this year as we deploy more storage projects”.
He declined to name customers of upcoming projects. — Bloomberg
