On Thursday, Redwood Materials, an American Battery recycling company, revealed a new business named Redwood Energy. The main goal of the startup is to help power the Artificial Intelligence (AI) boom by recycling its vast battery stockpile into energy storage systems.
According to JB Straubel, the founder of Redwood Battery Recycling, the new business is converting a huge hoard of old batteries into the most essential and valuable materials that power EV (electric Vehicles) and other innovative devices.
The new strategic move will help Redwood capitalize on the increasing demand for sustainable and reliable energy sources to power the advancing infrastructure of AI, JB Straubel added.
AI boom and rapid electrification have significantly impacted the overall production of Redwood, helping them to easily accomplish their company’s main goal: to deliver fast, less expensive, and scalable energy using old batteries.
Powering the Artificial Intelligence Age – Redwood Materials
Traditional mining practices and the battery recycling process of Redwood caused various environmental concerns such as significant Carbon Emissions, degradation of land, water contamination, and depletion. By diverting the company’s huge battery Hoard toward the AI energy boom, it will help to mitigate these issues and also to enhance firm loyalty by reducing environmental concerns, according to JB Straubel.
As a part of the new startup with AI, the company aims to convert the lightly utilized batteries of Electric Vehicles into energy storage systems that can serve industrial clients, data centers, and the grid.
According to Redwood, the initial deployment of Redwood materials is live: a battery system containing 12MW of power, having storage of 63 MWh that powers a two-thousand-GPU data centre for an AI infrastructure entity named Crusoe. Similarly, the second world’s life battery deployment and the highest off-grid data center are located in North America.
Redwood is removing significant minerals and metals from the used batteries and directing them into the supply chain of electric vehicles. The company’s latest move regarding their new startup is to realize the immense second-life value these batteries can provide before they are taken into the recycling process, according to Redwood.
The company processes over 20 GWh of used lithium-ion batteries every year and offers 250,000 EVs or recycled majority percentage (90%) of lithium-ion batteries in North America.
Redwood said that, when compared to the original capacity, most of the battery packs remain fifty percent to eighty percent. Hence, they are not effective for vehicles but useful for stationary energy storage, which is essential for the current era where data centre energy plays a main role.
According to Redwood Energy, the recent AI data center construction in the Nevada campus of Redwood helps to produce more power than traditional cloud infrastructure.
Redwood estimates that by the end of this year, the US alone will reach around 100,000 EVs, and about five million EVs on the US roads implies 350 GWh of energy storage capacity. Moreover, the company also anticipates that the count will increase annually by 150 GWh.
By directing large Battery hoards toward the AI Energy Boom, Redwood material ensures a potential win-win approach for both their economic scalability and environmental sustainability.
