Nissan and Ecobat to give EV batteries a second life

The carmaker and the battery recycling specialist have signed a “Strategic Pilot Agreement,” bringing together expertise from both partners. According to the rather brief media statement, the goal is to “investigate ways of commercialising the process of locating, safely transporting, dismantling, repairing and repurposing EV batteries for second life usage.”

The first step will be covering the old batteries from UK salvage operators. The batteries will then be assessed and sent to Ecobat’s UK Diagnostic and Disassembly Centre in Darlaston near Birmingham “using specialist vehicles.” Nissan experts will help determine the batteries’ “long term safety and performance.”

The goal is to create a sustainable circular energy economy. That means that Nissan will offer the recovered and assessed batteries for second-life applications. These include battery energy storage systems for emergency power backup or power balancing, as well as mobile power charging systems. And since the carmaker is involved in the process from beginning to end, these products will come “with the added reassurance of an official manufacturer warranty,” Nissan emphasises. Batteries that are not suitable for second-life application will be recycled.

“We are working together with Ecobat to assess how we engage with salvage operators, manage transportation, test, repair and reuse electric vehicle batteries in order to understand the commercial value chain, ” said Alan Low, EV Battery Circular Economy Manager at Nissan Energy Services. “These are batteries from cars that have been dismantled due to old age or that have been written off by insurers, however the batteries themselves still have an opportunity to be reused. They still have a useful life ahead of them, so we need to create a sustainable way of recovering them.”

“We provide a specialist offering for battery handling, with highly skilled engineers that are trained to work on high voltage batteries, in full compliance with UK battery regulations,” said Tom Seward, EU Key Accounts Director (Northern & UK) at Ecobat Solutions UK Ltd, said. “This is a critical piece of the EV sustainability picture that has real environmental benefits. We even recover any energy stored in the salvaged battery and use it to provide power to the onsite EV charger network at our site.”

Ecobat signed a similar deal with Volkswagen in the UK a few weeks ago. However, that partnership only concerns the recycling of batteries rather than assessing them for second-life applications. Ecobat already has two recycling plants, one in the UK and one in Germany. A third is under construction in the US, in the state of Arizona.

Source: Infos per mail