Los Angeles-based B2U Storage Solutions is currently using 1,300 retired battery packs from old Honda & Nissan electric vehicles at its solar and energy storage facility in Lancaster, California. Now the storage facility has reached an energy content of 25 MWh.
B2U (“Battery Second Use”) Storage Solutions specialises in the development and operation of large-scale stationary energy storage systems from second-life batteries from electric vehicles and is now using said 1,300 battery packs from power cars from Honda and Nissan with a total capacity of 25 megawatt-hours for their connected use at the facility called SEPV Sierra. The plant has already been in operation since 2020 and has been successively expanded until it has now reached 25 MWh.
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The energy storage unit sells electricity and grid services to Californian electricity wholesalers and generated a turnover of over one million US dollars in 2022 alone, currently equivalent to around €930,000.
B2U connects the retired battery packs in series for its EV Pack Storages (EPS) and then connects these strings together in parallel. The controllers can drive the strings so that during charge and discharge cycles, weaker batteries with lower capacity do not limit the performance of stronger batteries. “This approach enables our system to achieve efficient energy yield despite the variance in capacity inherent in second life batteries,” says Freeman Hall, co-founder and CEO of B2U Storage Solutions.
A special feature here is that when B2U inserts the battery packs into the cabinets for second-life storage, its technology allows the company to continue using the battery pack’s existing battery management system and connects it to its own control unit. According to Hall, this is primarily intended to reduce costs. The disadvantage: the system has to be adapted to the respective BMS unit of a battery type, so you can’t integrate batteries from just any vehicle.
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B2U is already working on this. In the future, the SEPV-Sierra storage or other systems could open up much greater potential than old batteries from Honda and Nissan: B2U says it has also already successfully tested the configuration of its energy storage system with battery packs from the Chevrolet Bolt and the Tesla Model 3. The latter series is the world’s best-selling electric car with well over 1.5 million units.
