Very interesting article. one of the colleges out here has a program similar to this they are starting up. Ironically i met the person who was going to be in charge of that program at an annual / 2x year electric vehicle event that jax / jea puts on and i bring my energica's to, to show off.
I got to talking to him a bit about some of the things ive been doing with batteries, and long story short, i'll be meeting with him and his team next week for a tour i guess you could call it of their program they are going to put out and to share some of my ideas / things ive done along with, what worked, what didn't work, lessons learned. Really looking forward to see what they got set up. They are looking at teaching how to fix these things, work on cars, battery packs. i brought up, don't forget home storage batteries, THAT is a money maker too, someone's power wall shits a 3k battery because a 200 dollar bms fails... yah good repair money.
I was explaining how easy it is to fix a bad bms, replace a cell / spot charge a bad battery in a bank to test it, in - situ and how, just because a battery may only be at 80 percent cap does not mean it's bad, ..
instead of running a fork lift, have it run the night shift or put it in a 'situation' slightly less demanding. In the days where lead acid was all the rage, fork lift batteries worked great for home storage. the thing was not able to run a forklift for an 8 hour day anymore, so they needed a new one because of the demand use, but it worked fine for your house and with the proper care could last another decade. You could get them super cheap, at times almost at scrap price until it caught on.
Use them for spot storage of solar power, instead of having huge battery farms, split them out like micro grids. that way worse case, you start a fire, ok bad news but you burn up 100 kw of batteries. ehh not 100 mw of batteries, holy fuck this is a mess!!
i bet if they do some sort of, tested ok program they could sell them pretty much as is to hobbyists too, or equip manu's where cutting edge full cap is not critical...
right now im goofing off, these crypto mining farms, new tech came out so the older miners are being dumped dirt cheap. refurbing often is just a little cleanup, tighten a few heat sinks, a bit more thermo paste, replace a 6 dollar fan or two and it's good for another year straight. im getting solar panels, new for 29 cents a watt (420 watt panels, so no they aint small) and getting batteries for free, id say 80 percent of them are a bad arm / few bad cells and right back in business. being litho fe phosphate, a bms is easily to build, and is not hyper critical, keep amps and volts in 70 percent and you are golden. rebuilt batteries, panels are running my crypto miners and charging up batteries during day and once sun goes down i get another 5 to 6 hours of mining (more as i obtain more battery storage)_so what power i generate that is not running the house, charging my bikes up, im using for crypto. hey it pays for tires on the bikes
Another bonus is, during the winter months ill move the rigs indoors and run them especially at night, the heat they put off heats the house too and i don't need to run the heater. in the summer i can use the waste heat to heat up the hot water heater so don't need energy for that either, so it's a dual win.
they'll get good money off the lipo packs, very heavy nickel, cobalt copper in them, very good money. people bringing in electronics, the cellphones are a gift from heaven, i can get about12 dollars a board off them just pm content, even new ones.
the other day i was mooking around in the garage and come across some old recyclables i forgot about..... silver oxide watch batteries... i was playing with them myself for a while, but got tired and moved on, especially when silver was 16 an oz. now that silver is 45 an oz. yah those 240 lbs of batteries are a nice payday. i have a 30 gallon drum full of old pentium / 486 cpu's that i been sitting on forever. one of my years gone by ill get to this one day projects. had them since the late 90s early 2000's. i bought them for like 2 dollars each i think. I think it's time to just dump all these projects and move on for good just stick with the current battery stuff.
That article is so right about, we throw away so much shit. Even lith batteries, there is no way you can convince me that a shredded battery is not just as good if not orders of magnitude better than raw ore from the ground. Even the plastic is recyclable. They might be leery because of liability but i bet they could find a lot of use repurposing and not just shred / recycle.
aaron
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Topic: Recycling rechargable battery plant visit article (Read 5508 times)