Hidden between two massive buildings in the hills of the Nevada desert, 805 retired EV batteries are in neat formation, each wrapped in inconspicuous white sails -and hidden in sight.
A passerby may not realize that this modest array is the largest Microgrid in North America, that it drives a modular data center for 2,000 GPU for AI infrastructure company Crusoe, or that it represents the next large act of JB Straubel, the co-founder and CEO of Redwood Materials.
Redwood Materials announced Thursday during an event in its Sparks, Nevada facility that launched an energy storage company that will use the thousands of EV batteries that it collected as part of its battery recycling company to offer companies clean electricity, starting with AI data workers.
The new company, called Redwood Energy, starts with partner Crusoe. The old EVs, which are not yet ready for recycling, store energy that is generated from an adjacent solar -Array. The system, which generates 12 MW of electricity and has 63 MWH capacity, sends electricity to a modular data center built by Crusoe, the AI ​​infrastructure company that is best known for its large-scale data center campus in Abilene, Texas-the first site of the Stargate project.
The scale of the battery collection of Redwood is amazing. Redwood said it is repairing more than 70% of all used or discarded battery packages in North America. Apparently it has been in stock batteries that are not ready for recycling, with more than 1 gigawatt hour in his inventory already. In the coming months it expects to receive another 4 gigawatt hours.
By 2028, the company said that it is planning to implement 20 Gigawatt hours storage on grid scale, so that it is placed on the right track to become the largest recoveryper of used EV-battery pakets.
Straubel’s confidence in the aim was clearly in every detail of the launch event. In order to illustrate the dedication of Redwood – and by extension, straubel – everything about the production, from the lights and DJ to the food and the large screen, the Microgrid were driven by the Microgrid.
“We wanted to go everything in it,” said Straubel, in a broad, toothy smile. Splashy effects for the event aside, the Microgrid setup with Crusoe is not a demonstration project. Straubel said that this is an income -generating operation and one that is profitable. He added that even more of this will be used with other customers this year.
“I think this has the potential to grow faster than the core recycling company,” he said.
Redwood Materials has an extension of an expansion in recent years. The company, which has collected $ 2 billion in private funds, was founded in 2017 by Straubel, the former Tesla CTO and the current board member, to create a circular supply chain.
The company has started recycling scrap of the production of battery cells and consumer electronics such as mobile telephone batteries and laptops. After processing these discarded goods and extracting materials such as cobalt, nickel and lithium that are usually mined, Redwood delivers them back to Panasonic and other customers. In the course of time, the company is extensively further than the recycling and in the production of cathode. Redwood generated $ 200 million in income in 2024, a large part of which stemes from the sale of battery materials such as cathodes.
The company’s footprint has also grown and much further than the Carson City, Nevada’s head office. It has closed deals with Toyota, Panasonic and GM, started construction in a factory in South Carolina and has made a takeover in Europe.
Redwood Energy is the next step, one that is not bound by setting up its systems to be an off-grid. The retired EV batteries can be powered by wind and solar energy, or they can be bound by the grid. In the case of the Crusoe project, the system is driven by solar energy.
“No green intention is required here,” said Cto Colin Campbell during a tour of the Microgrid. “It is a good economic choice that happens to be carbon -free.”
The business model takes on a long -term challenge in the energy storage sector. For more than ten years, companies have promised to build storage on the grid scale from used EV batteries, but they have only been materialized in small quantities. Redwood, which started as a battery material and recycling company, creates a new line that promises to deliver Gigawatt with much -needed energy storage in just a few years.
“This really shows how frugal the waste hierarchy actually is,” Jessica Dunn, a battery expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Techcrunch. The fact that a large recycler such as Redwood recognized the profit potential in reused EV batteries shows: “Where this market will go at the end of the lifespan,” she added.
The re -use of batteries is a clear business opportunity for Redwood, but it can also be a business necessity. Redwood was founded to build a supply chain that can handle the predicted wave of used EV batteries that will come on the market. But that wave did not come out as quickly as some predicted.
“If Redwood did not enter the redesigning market, they would not get a share of the reused battery. They would have to wait the five, 10, 15 years until they retire,” she said. In the meantime, other companies could sell the batteries for storage on the grid, which cuts Redwood from the years of income.
Straubel acknowledged this and noted in an interview that Redwood materials started a little early in many respects.
“We started very early, and in a certain sense we started Redwood almost too early,” he said, noticed that the company initially collected consumer batteries and production scrap prior to the coming wave of EVs.
The current state of the recycling market underlines the challenge. “At the moment, the recycling market is mainly the production of scrap, consumer electronics and EV batteries that have failed under warranty,” Dunn said. That is sufficient for Redwood to process more than 20 gigawatt hours annually. But it fades compared to the 350 Gigawatt hours in EVs today and the 150 Gigawatt hours that are expected to go out every year.
Redwood currently has a recycling facility on its 175-hectare campus in Sparks, Nevada, and it develops a 600-hectare facility in Charleston, South Carolina. The latter will restore cathode and anode copper foil, both of which contain critical minerals that the US would rather stay within its limits.
The company said earlier that it will be able to make 100 gigawatt hours of Cathode Active Material and Anode film by the end of this year. Towards the end of the decade, the production will hit 500 Gigawatt hours.
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