EVwire brief: Redwood Materials is installing about 100 retired General Motors battery packs at a GM factory in Michigan, standing them up as a 1.5 MW / 7.2 MWh bank of dispatchable energy for the plant.
Over the system's life, Redwood expects it to knock more than $3 million off the factory's power bills. The project also hands GM a milestone: no other carmaker has worked with Redwood at every stage a battery passes through, from scrap on the production line, to worn-out packs pulled from cars, to a second tour as stationary storage.
The two companies have been at this for a while. Scrap from Ultium Cells, the cell-making venture GM runs with LG Energy Solution, already flows to Redwood Materials from its US plants for recycling. Once a GM EV is finally done driving, its pack lands there too, bound for one of two fates: a second life as storage, or the shredder, where its metals are recovered for new cells.
Redwood Materials uses retired EV batteries for energy storage installations
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The numbers behind that flow are already sizable. Redwood says GM and Ultium have handed it north of 28,000 metric tons of battery material for recycling so far, with roughly 10,000 more packs lined up for second-life conversion at its Redwood Energy unit.
This is no pilot. GM packs are already on duty at Redwood's site in Sparks, Nevada, which the company bills as the world's biggest energy-storage system built from reused EV batteries and the largest microgrid in North America, keeping AI infrastructure firm Crusoe running. Michigan is the latest stop, arriving on the heels of a similar build Redwood completed at Rivian's factory in Normal, Illinois.
Redwood Materials is based in Nevada, close to Tesla’s Giga Nevada facility
Wringing a stretch of stationary-storage duty out of a pack before it heads to recycling is the same playbook behind Waymo's move to turn its retired robotaxi batteries into grid power.
As per Redwood, a large and growing pile of spent batteries already sits in the US, and that material can either stay put as domestic energy infrastructure or drain overseas. The GM tie-up, if any, shows the entire loop can run on home soil, from the assembly line to the highway to the grid.
Source: Redwood Materials
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