Economic analysis of retired batteries of electric vehicles applied to grid energy storage

Electric vehicles (EVs) are widely used around the world because they are environmentally friendly and not dependent on oil. However, as the battery cycles increase, it becomes unsuitable for EV use and needs to retire when its maximum available capacity decays to 80%. The retirement of a large number of EV power batteries poses a great challenge to the environment and low-carbon living, and the secondary use of batteries is now a very promising solution. The contribution of this paper is the practical analysis of lithium-ion batteries retired from EVs of about 261.3 kWh; detailed analysis of the cost of acquisition, disassembly, reassembly and secondary use; and finally the analysis based on the actual operating conditions of photovoltaic (PV)-load grid. We calculate that the cost of secondary use batteries can be recovered in about 2.5 years because of its very low cost, about 300yuan/kWh, but its performance is not worse than new batteries, compared with the three times cost difference. The secondary use battery applied to renewable energy, such as PV and wind energy storage, is very economical and has very good application prospects.