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“Day for history books:” Hazelwood becomes first coal plant to transition to big battery
(reneweconomy.com.au)
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That's a cool use for them, if we end up with a lot of them, I wonder if houses with the space could use them for cheap storage.
I have read something about that being done before. The batteries are made up of a bunch of individual cells wired together, so they can be disassembled, have the bad cells removed, and the good cells can be used to re-create "new" batteries. In the article I read a homeowner had made his own system doing that, so it is obviously something that can be done without a huge investment if you know what you are doing.
The cells that are not appropriate for re-use in other applications can be used to recover a lot of useful material. But we really need to be investing more in the facilities (and technology) to do this, preferably before we end up with warehouses full of stockpiled batteries going up in flames.
I wonder how cheap they'd be, as the storage capacity is quite a bit more than the average home battery!