Connected Energy says EV batteries should be reused or repurposed before recycling wherever safety and performance allow. For dismantlers, second-life battery storage could turn costly battery handling into a commercial opportunity, but the route will depend on practical testing, aggregation and collaboration between OEMs, ATFs, insurers and producer responsibility organisations.
As more EV batteries begin reaching dismantlers through end-of-life and accident-damaged vehicles, the industry needs clear, commercially viable routes beyond immediate recycling. Alex Charr, Chief Operating Officer at Connected Energy, explains why reuse and repurposing should come first, how second-life battery storage can turn a liability into an asset, and why collaboration between ATFs, OEMs, insurers and producer responsibility organisations will be essential.
From Automotive Insight to Battery Value
Connected Energy sits at the intersection of the automotive and energy storage worlds, taking batteries as they leave vehicles and giving them a new life as energy storage. That means that our first customers, what we call the ‘downstream’, are the vehicle manufacturers, battery suppliers, fleet operators, or whoever owns those batteries. Having spent years in that world, working for the likes of Renault, Peugeot, Toyota, and later Arrival, I have a real advantage. I understand their industry language, their constraints, the way decisions get made. It means I can tailor how I engage with them so that what we’re offering actually resonates.
Repurpose First, Recycle Late
The basic question is: why would we, as a society, destroy batteries that are still functional and can still deliver significant value for another decade before we dismantle them? Think of the glass bottle deposit schemes in Belgium, where I lived for a few years, where you return empty bottles to be cleaned and reused rather than broken down and remanufactured into the same bottle you started with. The logic is identical.
Every second-life battery energy storage system we install, and every EV battery repurposed, is one fewer battery that needs to be imported or manufactured from scratch, with all the energy, carbon, and supply chain benefits that come with it.
There’s also a practical dimension. Recycling infrastructure in the UK and Europe simply isn’t mature yet. It remains costly, and a significant proportion of the valuable black mass produced is exported back to Asia for processing. So, the valuable part of the recycling chain is happening outside our borders. Reuse and repurposing are complementary to recycling, not alternatives to it. Every battery given a second life today is a battery that reaches recycling in ten years’ time, by which point domestic capacity should be in place to handle it properly and keep that value here.
As for policymakers, there is a tendency to focus heavily on gigafactories and recycling, with much less attention to what happens in between. I was at an event last year called ‘Battery Recycling and Repurposing’. It should be the other way around.
Turning Battery Liability into Value
Very simply, we turn a battery from a liability into a financial asset. Right now, a used battery in a dismantler’s yard carries costs: storage, transport, recycling fees. For batteries that are commercially viable for second-life deployment, we can create positive value by deploying them in our systems, which means we can pay to take them.
What we’re offering is a genuine partnership solution, one that gives dismantlers a reliable, repeatable route to sell large numbers of packs to us, not just the occasional transaction. To put that in perspective, our ambition is to deploy one gigawatt-hour of second-life battery capacity by 2030. At around 50kWh per pack, that means we’re looking for approximately 20,000 batteries between now and 2030, sourced across vehicle OEMs, battery suppliers, fleet operators and dismantlers. Grid-scale battery storage is the second largest market segment for batteries globally, so our end product gives us the capacity to monetise very large volumes. The scale of our value proposition is matched to the scale of the problem.
Testing That Works for Dismantlers
This is one of the genuinely difficult challenges we face in working with dismantlers. Historically, we’ve worked with vehicle and battery OEMs who are fully equipped for the selection process: it’s their battery, they have the testing equipment, and they have the technical expertise to support us. Dismantlers operate in a very different environment.
We haven’t defined what the right solution looks like yet, and we’re not trying to define it in isolation. We’re engaging with dismantlers now to understand their operational constraints, so that together we can arrive at a process that meets our safety and commercial requirements as well as their practical ones. We know our constraints; they know theirs. It has to be a genuine collaboration. If we design something in a vacuum and it turns out to be unworkable on the ground, we’ve solved nothing.
Aggregating Batteries at Scale
It’s a completely different operational picture. We currently work with around 20 to 30 vehicle and battery OEMs, and that relatively small number of relationships covers the large majority of the EV market. But as you know better than most, there are tens of thousands of authorised treatment facilities across Europe, the majority of them small or medium-sized businesses running one or a handful of sites.
There are two routes through this. Large pan-European dismantler groups own and operate networks of ATF sites, so working with them allows us to aggregate batteries across multiple locations through a single relationship. But for the small to medium-sized independent operators, we believe that Producer Responsibility Organisations (PROs) could play a really important role as an aggregator of packs from all the ATFs within their network. It would be impractical for us to engage with every individual dismantler, even though we genuinely want to work with all of them. PROs are the mechanism that could make that possible.
Building the Battery Route Now
We believe that, based on 15 years of experience, we have the right solution to address this problem at the scale it demands. But it requires collaboration across the industry, and many things need to be in place before we can efficiently take batteries from our partners and deploy them in our systems.
Anticipation is everything. Trying to solve this problem when dismantlers already have large volumes of batteries to sell is too late. The two challenges I’ve described- how we identify batteries suitable for second-life, and how we aggregate and move them efficiently are the ones we’re actively working on now. We’re looking for as many inputs as possible from across the industry to make sure we find the right answers together, because the window to build this infrastructure properly is now.
Further Reading from ATF Professional
-
Maximising EV Battery Value: Why Repurposing Deserves a Place in the EV Battery Value Chain
-
Connected Energy to Develop UK’s Most Advanced Second-Life EV Battery Testing Facility
-
store and ClearWatt Partner to Unlock UK’s Used EV Battery Market with Advanced Testing Solution
