Unveiling Opportunities in Second-Life Batteries & Energy Storage:
March 21 from 3:00 PM  to 3:40 PM at Summit Stage
Autonomy Mobility World Expo at Paris Porte de Versailles
(now the Global Decarbonization)

Last week at Autonomy I had the honor and pleasure of connecting Ulrika Tornerefelt ☀️🔋of Stella Futura with Salim EL HOUAT of Mob-Energy and Benoît Samanos of MECAWARE to discuss a topic I actively support: the use of second-life batteries and energy storage.

The design of the panel and its questions are often influenced by bits and pieces of conversations I hear over time. On this occasion, it came from an industry investor who said something I've heard before:
"The premise is good and on top of the sustainability aspect the potential cut to capital expenditure is very compelling. However, I've heard second life projects struggling to meet technical performance standards and large-scale BESS is not yet established enough for financiers to be comfortable with any risk on the technical side."

My goal was to form questions to debunk this thought as well as educate, inspire, share best practices and well yes, give and gain visibility on something we care about.

📣 We discussed one of the key drivers being the Critical Raw Material Act in Europe, incentivizing the recycling of batteries, as well as the reduction of CO2 emissions.
📣 We then went over the challenges of sourcing batteries and need for a steady supply of the same module type, the lack of standardisation for second life and current state of regulations.
📣 We ended on carbon credits and how we can leverage those to compensate for the high cost of recycling and reusing batteries.

I look forward to continuing the discussion with our panelists and meeting them next year.

-Alix