It's interesting that almost every automaker working on electric vehicles (apart from Tesla*!) is planning to re-use battery packs instead of recycling them for materials:
Mercedes-Benz converting a coal power plant into an energy storage system with electric car batteries.
BMW have connected over 500 i3 battery packs to the UK National Grid to create the largest energy storage project to date.
Nissan recently unveiled a really cool project - new street lights powered by used Leaf battery packs & solar.
And now Renault are launching a new program, aiming to build the “the biggest energy stationary storage system using EV batteries ever designed in Europe by 2020"
According to the company, the first facilities will be developed in early 2019 on three sites in France and Germany: at the Renault plants in Douai and Cléon and at a former coal-fired plant in North Rhine-Westphalia. From there, they plan to “gradually expand over time to contain the energy of 2,000 EV batteries.
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*Tesla instead plans to mine old battery packs for materials in order to build new ones.
While several automakers have now launched “second-life” programs for used electric vehicle battery packs, Renault is in a particularly good position to run those programs because of how it sells many of its electric vehicles. In some markets, Renault sold most of its Zoe electric vehicles while retaining ownership of the battery packs. They have also offered battery upgrades – resulting in them having significantly more used battery packs than the average automaker. Now Renault wants to take advantage of that model with this new energy storage program.