Jaguar Land Rover is working to turn used EV batteries from the Jaguar I-Pace into energy storage systems (ESS). This new program gives a second life to the many raw materials used to make the batteries and offers a preview to the long-term future of EV batteries as JLR begins to expand the offering of electrified Land Rovers and Jaguars.
An ESS is an off-grid power system, allowing a house, business, or part thereof to be powered off a large-scale battery. One of the most well-known implementations is the Tesla Power Wall, which can act as a battery backup for an entire house.
The JLR ESS uses the batteries from a scrapped I-Pace – in this case preproduction and prototype models – and even reuses the power controllers and wiring, meaning that 85% of an I-Pace’s battery system ends up being reused. The ESS can hold up to 125 kWh of power, and can be recharged on solar.
It’s the beginning of JLR’s research into circular business models for their vehicles, as they look to do more in-house reuse and recycling to reduce their carbon footprint to net zero by 2039.
One of these new ESS will be deployed at JLR’s largest Experience Center in Johannesburg, South Africa, where inconsistent power delivery is causing issues with keeping the Experience open. The battery will help to keep their power on, even when the grid goes down.
JLR also intends to reuse some of the raw materials in the batteries in new batteries for new EVs. Nickel, lithium, and cobalt are among the rare and valuable materials in an EV battery that are worth pulling out of scrapped batteries for reuse. This has become even more important as the rise of EVs collides with geopolitical conflicts like the war in Ukraine. Many valuable natural resources needed to make EV batteries are located in tense areas of the world, and recycling schemes can help to ramp up EV production without further increasing reliance on new resources to make cars go. Russia is a major nickel producer -- though their nickel often goes into stainless steel, not batteries -- and the current sanctions are causing a domino effect on the entire nickel market, jacking up prices.
With electrification coming to JLR vehicles more and more in the coming years, it’s important to find a place for batteries to go at the end of their life cycle – something that hasn’t been sorted out on a large scale yet, since there have only been about a decade’s worth of high-volume mainstream EV sales in the marketplace so far. Solutions like energy storage systems and materials recovery are a key part of a sustainable battery life cycle.
Sign up and receive once every 2 weeks
Select Your Vehicle
