End-of-life or second-life options for retired electric vehicle batteries

E-mobility, especially electric cars, has been scaling up rapidly because of technological advances in lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). However, LIBs degrade significantly with service life cycles. With the current increase in the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), a large volume of retired LIB packs, which can no longer provide satisfactory performance to power an EV, will soon appear. Various end-of-life (EOL) options are under development, such as recycling and recovery. Recently, stakeholders have become more confident that giving the retired batteries a second life by reusing them in less-demanding applications, such as stationary energy storage, may create new value pools in the energy and transportation sectors. In this perspective, we evaluate the feasibility of second-life battery applications, from economic and technological perspectives, based on the latest industrial reports and technical publications.