The carmaker will follow Tesla in making components for large batteries used by electric utilities, data centers and other businesses to handle fluctuations in power supply and demand.

The carmaker will follow Tesla in making components for large batteries used by electric utilities, data centers and other businesses to handle fluctuations in power supply and demand.

© Rebecca Cook/Reuters

General Motors has expanded its partnership with Redwood Materials to cover every stage of the battery lifecycle — manufacturing scrap recovery, end-of-life recycling, and now second-life energy storage deployed at a GM factory. It’s the first automaker to hit all three with JB Straubel’s company.

The latest piece is a 1.5 MW / 7.2 MWh energy storage system built from roughly 100 repurposed GM battery packs, set to be installed at a GM manufacturing plant in Michigan. Redwood says the system will save the plant more than $3 million in electricity costs over its lifetime.

GM is developing an entirely new sodium-ion battery chemistry for use in everything from data centers to its own factories.

The Iran war is pushing countries to prioritize domestic energy in order to protect themselves from volatile oil and natural gas markets.

While we make batteries based on many different chemistries, nothing has approached the massive scale at which we can produce lithium batteries. That scale makes the economics of lithium-ion batteries hard to compete with. Even if we develop a superior battery technology, it's unclear whether we can get manufacturing costs down quickly enough to compete with the efficiency of the lithium supply chain and manufacturing.

The one thing that could change the dynamics is a supply crunch. While lithium is extremely widespread, lithium that can be extracted economically is a different matter. It's cheapest to extract it from brines, and lithium-rich brines are largely limited to South America. We do obtain some lithium from other sources, but it's considerably more expensive.

In today's issue of Science, however, a research team has identified an energy-efficient means of extracting lithium from rocks. The process they've designed uses far less energy than existing ones, regenerates all its starting chemicals, and produces byproducts that could also be sold.

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California truckers have expressed strong interest in the Tesla Semi because it costs much less and can travel further on a charge than electric trucks sold by established manufacturers.