Rivian’s factory will soon be powered partly by old batteries from its own EVs

At its factory in Illinois, Rivian will soon use more than 100 retired EV batteries in an on-site power system that will help it save money on electric bills.

The electric automaker is one of the first customers of Redwood Materials’s new energy storage business, which takes old or discarded EV batteries—in this case, from Rivian’s own vehicles—and deploys them in a second life on the grid.

By making it possible to charge when there’s excess energy available and the cost of electricity is low, the project “can generate significant cost savings that directly contributes to a reduction in the cost of our vehicles,” says Andrew Peterman, who runs Rivian’s advanced energy program. It also means that the manufacturer can use more renewable energy, since excess solar and wind power is available at certain times of day.

It’s part of Rivian’s larger approach to energy. “There’s always been this shared vision of transportation and what we’re doing on the automotive side and linking that to grid transformation, enabling affordable, reliable, and cleaner electricity for everyone,” Peterman says.

At the factory, the company also has behind-the-meter solar panels and a 2.8-megawatt-hour wind turbine that together provide enough power to charge each new vehicle with 100% clean energy before it leaves the factory. Now the solar and wind power will be connected to the batteries, along with the grid itself.

“We’ll charge the batteries when it’s cheapest and the grid has a surplus,” Peterman says. “Then when the grid gets constrained—say, in the middle of the summer when it’s 5 p.m. and the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining, and you see a tremendous amount of strain on the grid—that’s when we would discharge these batteries to our plant, relieving the grid of that strain.”

Redwood, the battery recycling company built by Tesla cofounder JB Straubel, designed technology to manage networks of used batteries seamlessly, and will operate the new system at Rivian’s factory. (Redwood’s first system, at its own campus in Nevada, uses EV batteries to store energy from a field of solar panels and run an adjacent data center built by Crusoe, a project that is now set to expand.)

At the Rivian factory, the new energy storage system will use batteries that were previously used in Rivian trucks and SUVs, including test vehicles. When a used EV battery is partially depleted and no longer has enough power for driving, it can still have a long life storing electricity. More than 100 batteries will be laid out in a field near Rivian’s wind turbine, providing around 10 megawatt-hours of electricity storage. It’s not designed to back up the whole factory, but it’s enough to make a meaningful difference in Rivian’s electricity bills.

Rivian declined to comment on the cost of the new system or the payback period, though it noted that it’s an affordable solution.

The solution makes sense for other factories, says Peterman, and could also be used to support applications like public EV charging. Instead of straining the grid, he says, chargers “can now serve as a resource for the grid, coupled with these large energy storage solutions.”

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