One of the core challenges of lithium-ion battery recovery is the cost of safely collecting, sorting and transporting the spent batteries to reuse applications or recycling facilities. Smartville is addressing this challenge through the development of heterogenous unifying battery (HUB) facilities at distributed locations for advanced screening and conditioning. Smartville’s HUB facilities will create value within the reverse logistics supply chain by cost-effectively qualifying used batteries to enable safe, reliable, and economic repurposing of these assets for utility-scale and customer-sited energy storage applications prior to ultimate end-of-life recycling.
“Our HUB system meets the economic demands of reverse logistics by consolidating the lithium-ion battery collection to distributed locations, minimizing the transportation costs and risks within the supply chain,” explained Smartville Team Captain Mike Ferry.
Smartville is developing a streamlined process for screening, conditioning, and repurposing operations at the HUB facilities, aided by Renewance and Spiers New Technology as collection, logistics, and recycling partners. Any batteries with consistent remaining life will be captured and integrated by Smartville for second-use applications. The HUB facilities ensure efficiency in reverse logistics by serving as a one-stop location for lithium-ion battery collection, sorting, storage, conditioning, second-life reuse, and recycling.
For the third and final phase of the Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling Prize, Smartville is conducting a pilot demonstration of the Modular Assembly Battery (MOAB) systems, an essential component to repurposing spent lithium-ion batteries for stationary storage. The MOAB, enabled by its proprietary power electronics and balancing control, provides a universal platform for assessing and repurposing battery packs of different makes and models, and serves as the scalable building block for Smartville’s hybrid repurposing and recycling HUB facility. Within the next five years, Smartville plans to deploy two HUB facilities in the U.S. to provide services in locations with high lithium-ion battery recycling needs, achieving annual battery processing capacity of over 25,000 metric tons. Whether or not the batteries are repurposed, the HUB facility will be able to track and recycle batteries at the end of life to meet DOE’s rate of recycling target of 90%.
For more information on the Smartville HUB facility and MOAB building block, contact Mike Ferry at .
