Moment Energy plans to mass-produce grid storage from used EV batteries

Plenty of visionaries have extolled the benefits of putting old electric-car batteries to work instead of throwing them away. Moment Energy is bringing something new to this concept: large-scale manufacturing.

In late October, the startup won a $20 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to build a factory in Taylor, Texas, to produce shippable containers of previously loved batteries.

Four founders launched Moment Energy in an actual home garage in British Columbia back in 2020. They’ve since graduated to a more spacious base in Coquitlam, B.C., where they receive previously used electric-vehicle batteries, grade them based on wear and tear, and assemble them into enclosures to supply stationary energy storage. The company has installed seven projects so far, with the reused batteries helping remote outposts use more solar power and burn less diesel.

“We’re able to provide a more cost-effective product where they don’t have to compromise on performance,” said co-founder and COO Sumreen Rattan, in an interview. ​“For the customer, they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference,” compared to a brand-new battery system.

The company’s progress so far isn’t unique — a cadre of other startups (ReJoule, Smartville, RePurpose Energy) can point to early field installations, typically grant-funded research projects. Those are useful starting points, but they remain wildly out of step with the scale of production that has made lithium-ion batteries a force to be reckoned with in the energy system. For second-life batteries to make a dent in our persistent fossil-fuel fix, they need to be less hands-on and more mass produced.

Which is why Moment Energy’s grant-funded Texas factory is so notable. The company plans to produce up to 1 gigawatt-hour of storage products there each year, easily making the facility the largest of its kind in the U.S. And the whole production line will be covered by the UL 1974 safety certification, a key vote of confidence that the mixing and matching of batteries won’t lead to risky products.

Lowering storage costs for the forgotten commercial market

The energy storage market keeps blasting through records, but it’s highly concentrated in two categories: Small, mass-produced residential batteries are proliferating as a companion to rooftop solar, and massive utility-scale projects are taking off as a way to deliver clean energy on command in places like California and Texas.

This leaves a gap, Rattan said, for the commercial and industrial buyers who might need a few hundred kilowatt-hours up to around 10 megawatt-hours. Storage vendors don’t focus as much on building products for that segment, or selling to them.

Indeed, a handful of companies spent years targeting commercial and industrial storage, arguing they could use batteries to shave peak-demand charges and make money helping the grid. But one by one, pioneers like Stem and AMS pivoted away from the business of developing commercial battery fleets, and focused instead on software. The payoff wasn’t there for the effort to permit and install the relatively small capacity that could fit at a school or an office building.

Moment Energy’s thesis is that it can win over those forgotten customers by cutting the upfront price for energy storage. At scale, the containers of carefully vetted used batteries can deliver energy storage at 30 percent lower cost than an equivalent set of newly manufactured batteries, Rattan said. And customers with sustainability goals appreciate a product that doesn’t require new mining and keeps batteries out of the waste stream.

A different company, B2U Storage Solutions, has developed its own utility-scale power plants in the outer reaches of Los Angeles County. That firm installed second-life batteries in 2021 at a roughly one-third discount compared to new battery pricing, very much in line with the savings that Moment Energy is talking about.

These cost savings only materialize if the assemblage of different batteries from different cars works together safely: When batteries are involved, the looming imperative is always to make sure they don’t catch fire. Much of Moment’s special sauce comes in the sorting of used batteries based on their degradation and the battery management system that controls the batteries with special care for their different operational conditions.

Those engineering challenges are solvable, in part because the kind of use that batteries get from charging up on solar and discharging a few times a day amounts to a gentle retirement from propelling vehicles through byways and highways.

“What we end up using them for is much less stressful for the battery, which is why the application works in the first place,” Rattan noted.

Factory on the way in Texas

Moment Energy still needs to finalize loan terms with the DOE in the coming months. That should allow factory design and development to begin in earnest in early 2025; the goal is to get the facility online within two years, though an exact date is to be determined, Rattan said.

The company pledged to create 50 construction jobs in Taylor, which sits northeast of Austin, and then 200 full-time roles once manufacturing begins. The DOE money came from the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains, as part of a $428 million award for projects in communities with former coal plants. Moment Energy will contribute its own funds to the project as well.

Building new lithium-ion battery factories at a competitive scale requires a couple billion dollars. Moment Energy is building a gigafactory for a tiny fraction of that. The key, of course, is leveraging all the work that happened previously at the conventional battery factories: mixing the slurries and printing them on metal foils, packing them into cells, clustering cells into modules, and grouping modules into packs. Startups have had a tough time breaking into conventional battery manufacturing — take a look at Our Next Energy or Northvolt — but the lower-cost, largely undeveloped second-life manufacturing space has lower barriers to entry.

That’s all contingent on securing enough used batteries in the first place. Moment has partnered with Mercedes-Benz Energy and other EV manufacturers, who send over the old batteries that they need to dispose of. Far fewer EVs were on the roads eight or 10 years ago, but enough batteries have cycled out of cars now that supply shouldn’t be an issue, Rattan said.

“There are more batteries available today than we can handle,” she said. ​“If we could have this facility set up tomorrow, we would.”

Such a factory doesn’t diminish the need for building new battery gigafactories, if the U.S. wants to reduce its outsize reliance on China for the key components of the clean energy transition. But the second-life factory would expand the range of the nascent U.S. battery manufacturing sector, getting more useful life out of all the batteries made elsewhere. And it adds ​“second-life battery manufacturing” to the roster of new jobs created by the onshoring of clean energy factories.

If this marketable purpose for used batteries goes mainstream, it could also unlock new forms of financing that make it easier to purchase new electric vehicles in the first place.