The hottest power battery recycling and echelon ut

Analysis of the power battery recycling and echelon utilization market and the limitations of the domestic energy storage industry

with the large-scale retirement of electric vehicle batteries in China approaching, as the last kilometer of new energy vehicles, the power battery recycling and echelon utilization will become the next blue ocean. But how to tap the huge business opportunities in retired batteries

why recycle the battery

the electric vehicle industry has grown rapidly in the past few years. Subsequently, the demand for battery raw materials will also be greatly increased. Cobalt and nickel are the most scarce resources in power batteries. Since 2016, the price of nickel has doubled from its low point, while the price of cobalt has more than tripled. Half of the cobalt reserves are in the politically unstable DRC. The child labor incident in the mine and the rumored windfall profits tax have seriously affected the stability of cobalt prices and the investment plan of enterprise mining. In the case of soaring prices of scarce resources and uncertain production, it is particularly important to obtain resources from battery recycling

secondly, from the perspective of environmental protection, waste power batteries contain a large number of heavy metals and organic substances, and toxic gases produced by electrolytes and their conversions, which will seriously threaten the environment and human health. Therefore, whether from the perspective of economy, resource safety or environmental protection, power battery recycling has great value and necessity

the trend of power battery retirement has entered an outbreak this year

according to industry estimates, the power battery of new energy vehicles in China will enter the stage of large-scale retirement from 2018. The retired power lithium battery will reach nearly 12gwh. In 2020, the recovery of power battery will be close to 25gw, and a certain measure H will be taken in time. By 2022, the recovery of power battery will be close to 45gwh. In terms of metal value, the domestic power battery recycling market will exceed 10 billion yuan in 2022, and the growth rate of the motor car industry will continue to expand in the future as we usually do experiments. However, the overall recycling network of domestic power batteries is still not perfect

what is the mode of battery recycling

referring to the experience of Japan, Japan has gradually established a battery recycling system of "battery production sales Recycling Treatment" since 1994. It is stipulated that automobile dealers are responsible for the free recycling of waste automobile batteries to the society, and automobile battery manufacturers are the main responsible person for the recycling of waste batteries. The manufacturer collects waste batteries from the dealer and transfers them to the waste battery processor for recycling. In the United States, although there are no regulations and policies at the federal government level, Tesla cooperates with kinsbury brothers and Umicore to recycle batteries in North America and Europe respectively

according to the current domestic policy direction, China's recycling model will be an industry alliance model dominated by production enterprises, which is between Japan and Tesla

in February 2018, seven ministries and commissions led by the Ministry of industry and information technology issued the Interim Measures for the management of the recycling of power batteries for new energy vehicles, proposing to implement the producer extension system and put automobile production enterprises in the first place. At the same time, automobile and battery production enterprises, ELV recycling and dismantling enterprises and comprehensive utilization enterprises are also encouraged to cooperate to build recycling channels

at present, the form of alliance is gradually formed: for example, Ningde era recycles through the previously acquired Bangpu; Greenmead has established recycling cooperation with BYD and Dongfeng; BAIC established an alliance with Ganzhou haopeng. These alliances will establish the industry model of power battery recycling in China in the future

echelon utilization is crucial

from the perspective of resource utilization, directly recycling retired batteries as raw materials is actually a disguised loss. When the use cost of echelon power battery is 1000 yuan per kilowatt hour, and the service life is more than 1000 times, its cost performance ratio is higher than that of lead-acid battery that can timely find the signs and biases. In the Interim Measures for the administration of recycling and utilization of new energy vehicle power batteries, it is also proposed that the utilization of waste power batteries should follow the principle of cascade utilization before recycling

cascade utilization refers to the transformation of vehicle power batteries whose capacity is reduced to less than%, and the utilization to energy storage, low-speed electric vehicles and other fields. We believe that echelon utilization can not only further reduce the battery cost from the business model, but also promote more energy storage application scenarios and markets

pilot projects of overseas echelon utilization

different energy storage scenarios have different requirements for batteries. Therefore, the applicable scenarios and business models of retired power batteries are the next difficult problem to explore. Just like recycling, some innovative attempts of overseas shaving utilization have great reference significance for the fledgling domestic market

American freewire company has launched a mobile electric vehicle charging station called Mobi. This product is made of waste electric vehicle batteries and can store 48kwh of electricity, which exceeds the battery capacity of most electric vehicles on the market at present

Nissan Motor and Sumitomo Co., Ltd. jointly established 4R Energy Co., Ltd. in 2010, which is committed to realizing the secondary commercial utilization of lithium battery of Nissan LEAF. The company recycles the waste batteries of leaf cars in the Japanese and American markets for residential and commercial energy storage equipment

in Europe, younicos recycles batteries to build a virtual power plant with combined distributed energy, and will participate in the electricity price of the primary frequency modulation market. It is formulated with a diamond cone with a top angle of 120 ° or a steel ball with a diameter of 1.59 and 3.18mm. The German Bosch Group has built a 2mw/2mwh large-scale photovoltaic power station energy storage system using the scrapped batteries of BMW ActiveE and I3 pure electric vehicles

in addition, Tesla has also deployed in electric energy storage applications, household energy storage walls, solar energy storage and other businesses. These future scenarios are also potential echelon utilization scenarios

factors restricting China's energy storage industry and echelon utilization

at present, the echelon utilization of energy storage system has been able to achieve the era of 1 yuan/wh. However, it cannot be popularized on a large scale in China, mainly because:

1) batteries have not entered the stage of mass retirement, so there are few batteries that can be used in echelons at present; 2) The performance, quality and cost of early power batteries are not as good as those of today's batteries. In addition, due to the lack of reference data caused by the rapid progress of power batteries in the past few years, the uneven performance and specifications of retired batteries, as well as the high difficulty of detecting the proportion, it is very difficult to market the current echelon utilization; 3) Supporting policies for relevant industries have not yet been implemented. For example, China's time-sharing pricing has not been implemented nationwide, so that the economic benefits of energy storage batteries cannot be maximized. So at present, most of the echelon utilization projects of power are in the stage of exploration and verification

however, with the improvement of battery performance and the substantial reduction and stabilization of cost, the value of echelon utilization of existing and future power batteries has been greatly improved. At the same time, we are also beginning to see the determination of large enterprises to promote this field. At the beginning of this year, China Tower signed a "strategic partnership agreement on the recycling of power batteries for new energy vehicles" with 16 new energy enterprises, including Chongqing Chang'an, BYD and Yinlong new energy, to explore the mode of echelon utilization of power batteries

according to the current market situation, ternary batteries are more suitable for resource recovery, and phosphate Ferri batteries are more suitable for echelon utilization

with the rising price of upstream materials, the revenue of ternary battery recycling is very high. At present, the cost of recycling ternary batteries is about yuan/ton, and the metal materials after recycling and dismantling can be sold for 42000 yuan at the current resource price. Due to resource price factors, the recovery value of lithium iron phosphate is very low. However, its own capacity retention rate and electrolyte retention rate are higher than that of ternary battery, with higher times of impulse storage, safer and higher use value. At present, lithium iron phosphate batteries have limited room for improvement in performance and cost, so lithium iron phosphate batteries should be prior to and more suitable for the application of ternary batteries in the echelon utilization and energy storage industry