AFAICT, used Tesla battery packs fetch a decent price on ebay etc. They're more valuable for reuse than they are for recycling. Reuse is better than recycling.
True and I agree, however batteries have a limited lifetime, and at the end of said lifetime, lithium batteries become dangerous. Does anyone risk putting a secondhand battery in their phones for example? Might be okay for old Nokia style batteries, but the integrated ones, not a chance.
Another problem is that with EV battery packs, they're not really viable to be disassembled and repaired (e.g. by replacing individual cells), they're built pretty solid and integrated. Not saying it's impossible, just that it's likely not viable, not to mention very dangerous work. I could be wrong though.
There are lots of 18650 "manufacturers" that actually just buy used batteries, re-wrap them, and sell them as new. I imagine that used Tesla battery packs may be used for this purpose pretty frequently. Unfortunately while this activity provides a great value for the players involved, the batteries are often passed off as new high-discharge cells to consumers who use them for vaporizers or flashlights. Using old spent cells for both of these use cases can be dangerous, but it's particularly worrying in vaporizers because the battery may fail catastrophically inches from the consumer's face.
No one is putting cylindrical cells on phones. These go to stationary storage. Also some people test and save each cell separately and put them in new packs.
It depends. What kills the batteries is fast charging or discharging and to an extent, leaving them sitting around fully charged or discharged. If the batteries are retired to do grid storage (or home storage), I would expect the charge and discharge rates to be fairly sedate, and charge levels to be managed so as not to have the battery level too low or too high for very long. I can easily imagine the batteries lasting a long time under such conditions.
Space and weight are also much less of a concern. A stationary infrastructure battery with less than half its original capacity wouldn't be unusable the way it would be for a car.
Industrial carbon capture coal electricity production is substantially more expensive than renewables or natgas at this point, no reason to turn to it.
And at that point it'll cheaper to "mine" those batteries for their cobalt, nickel and lithium than it will be to pull it out of the ground. At that point recycling will be viable because they'll have a large amount of fairly homogeneous batteries to recycle rather than the random hodge-podge of tiny batteries they have to deal with now.
Tesla isn't the only EV manufacturer. Others are ramping up production. Are their used batteries in such high demand?
Then there is the practical question. You have a 5 year old EV that doesn't get enough miles for your use any longer. So, you have someone swap out the batteries for new ones. Do the people who swap out the batteries actually resell them for reuse or try to recycle them? If it's not easy or financially viable they will likely not do it.
Just having technology isn't enough. It needs to be accessible to the people who will engage with it.
True and I agree, however batteries have a limited lifetime, and at the end of said lifetime, lithium batteries become dangerous. Does anyone risk putting a secondhand battery in their phones for example? Might be okay for old Nokia style batteries, but the integrated ones, not a chance.
Another problem is that with EV battery packs, they're not really viable to be disassembled and repaired (e.g. by replacing individual cells), they're built pretty solid and integrated. Not saying it's impossible, just that it's likely not viable, not to mention very dangerous work. I could be wrong though.