Second Use of Retired Lithium-ion Battery Packs from Electric Vehicles: Technological Challenges, Cost Analysis and Optimal Business Model

The high power performance of the large-capacity lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery pack has been proved to enable all-type electric vehicles (EVs) to keep more traffic safety and longer driving distances. Still, the high capital costs of Li-ion batteries impede the universal market adoption of EVs, due to approximately 50% of their costs originating from batteries. Through sophisticated recycling, re-manufacturing and reusing processes, those retired EV batteries usually holding residual 70 ~ 80% energy capacities can probably create long-term and stable profits from the proper second-use applications under a cleverly planed business operation. This reuse way can effectively lower the EV cost by extending the service lifetime of its batteries. Equally, this action completely meets with the environment-protection 3R principles of recycle, reuse and reduce. In this research, not only the second-use technology of EV Li-ion batteries was explored, but also the estimated profit rate can reach around 35% in the 15 service years of a 10kWh Li-ion battery pack.