Flux Power study extends electric car battery life

Many wondered when the beginning of this new market would be created and developed. It would make sense for entrepreneurs to start a secondary market for used battery packs that are no longer fit to drive electric cars, EV but still make for perfect local energy storage use. Imagine retiring your battery pack and use it to store electricity in your garage. Now imagine using that electricity during peak time after charging it off peak. Well, you get the idea.

Flux Power’s Extended Battery Life. Flux Power has just finished a Californian study that shows the potential of electric car battery packs’ secondary life. The company found that electric vehicle battery packs could be used to power household electric after its use in electric cars was finished. It is now pursuing ways of developing the right technology to extend the useful lifespan of electric vehicle batteries by repurposing them for a second life applications.

The study is a joint venture between The California Center for Sustainable Energy, CCSE, which led the research study. It was funded by a grant from the University of California, which was awarded by the Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle Research Center, a division of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis. This one-year study included Flux, San Diego Gas and Electric, AeroVironment Inc. of Monrovia, CA, and the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at UC Berkeley.

According to Chris Anthony, Flux Power Chief Executive Officer: "This research demonstrated the potential for extending electric vehicle batteries beyond their use in vehicles into secondary, household and enterprise applications. We can now pursue the development of technology to track and record electric vehicle battery life and thereby create new market opportunities and lower the total cost of ownership. The global electric vehicle and modular storage markets that we currently serve are demonstrably large and growing. The prospect of our technology becoming ubiquitous in a whole host of consumer and enterprise applications suggests that immense additional green technology markets could open up for us."

By testing and evaluating three lithium battery types, the San Diego Gas and Electric remotely charged and discharged them in order to understand how it would work in real grid conditions.

Electric car battery should develop a logical secondary market through recycling to be applied for different use. Powering home appliances and used as local energy storage makes plenty of sense. Now if only we had solar panels, wind turbines and other alternative energy sources to store electricity in these battery packs. Oh, yes, we already have this. In the meantime, we can only welcome the study with Flux Power to show the potential secondary life of electric car lithium batteries.