Ten-thousand tons to be recycled per GWh
Is the BESS industry in an ostrich position as regards recycling?
There’s news every day about new BESS plans, the volume of grid connection applications, TSO forecasts for the amount of energy storage and so on. In Germany the forecast is that we’ll have 10 GWh of BESS installed sometime around 2026-2027.
How much of this news references plans for the full lifecycle for everything that is being built? I don’t recall reading a single item of breathless news about the latest increase in BESS capacity also mentioning end-of-life or recycling plans. Isn’t that a bit strange?
We know - intellectually - that confronting an issue is the only way to resolve it. But any resolution will disrupt the status quo. Given the choice between conflict and change on the one hand, and inertia on the other, the ostrich position can seem very attractive.
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril
We can certainly visualise what the BESS look like, bright containers standing in green fields framed by transmission lines, the sun rising in the background. But are we also suffering from a case of collective wilful blindness about what happens to all of that hardware approx. 5000 cycles or ten years later?
Suppose that the average system is like this, here’s a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the hardware involved (correct me in the comments please):