“There will be no benefit to basing home energy storage systems on automotive batteries, in the medium or long term,” a representative of Mercedes-Benz Energy said, turning the emerging market on its head. The high performance requirements of electric vehicles (EVs) mean that not only do they demand powerful batteries but they are also ready to ditch those batteries when they lose just 20-30% efficiency. Home energy storage demands, in contrast, are much less taxing on batteries and this created the opportunity to give old EV batteries a second life – thereby generating additional value from these relatively expensive devices and encouraging the green solar + storage trend. “The sheer expense of developing and building those batteries in the first place makes a compelling case for capturing some additional value after their initial use. Second-life applications also delay the need to dispose of these resource-intensive products, which nobody has yet figured out how to do […]