Enclosed between two massive buildings in the hills of the Nevada Desert, 805 retired EV batteries lie in proper formation, each wrapped in indiscreet white cloths – and hiding.
A passerby may not realize that it is the largest Microgrid in North America, it operates a 2,000 GPU modular data center for an AI infrastructure company Crusoe, or that it is Redwood Materials co-founder and general manager JB Straubel the next great act.
Redwood Materials announced on Thursday during an event at its Sparks, Nevada Facility that it launched an energy storage that will exploit the thousands of EV batteries that it collected as part of its battery recycling business to provide clean power to companies, starting from AI data centers.
The new business, called Redwood Energy, is starting with a partner Crusoe. The old eVs, who are not yet ready for recycling, store energy generated from an adjacent solar table. From here the system, which generates 12 MW of power and has 63 MWh of capacity, sends power to a modular data center built by Crusoe, the AI infrastructure company best known for its large-scale data center in Abilene, Texas, the starting site of the Stargate project.
Redwood said it recovers more than 70% of all used or discarded batteries in North America. Apparently it stored batteries that are not ready for recycling, with more than 1 Gigawatt hour in its inventory already. In the coming months, it is expected to get another 4 Gigawatt hours.
By 2028, the company said it plans to deploy 20 Gigawatt hours of grid-scale storage, putting it on the way to become the largest repurposing of used EV battery packages.
To illustrate Redwood’s commitment – and by extension, Straubel – the entire event of the Lights and DJ company to the food and large screen, were operated by the Microgrid.
“We wanted to go into everything,” Straubel said, breaking a wide tooth smile. Splashy effects for the event aside, the Microgrid set up with Crusoe is not a demonstration. Straubel said this is a revenue-generation operation, and one profitable. And even more of these will be deployed with other customers this year.
“I think this has the opportunity to grow faster than the core recycling business,” he said.
Redwood Materials has been on expansion tear in recent years. The company that has risen $ 2 billion in private fundswas founded in 2017 by Straubel, the former Tesla CTO and current board member to create a circular supply chain.
The company began with recycling scratches of batter production as well as consumer electronics such as mobile batteries and laptops. After processing these discarded goods and extracting materials such as cobalt, nickel and lithium, which are usually mined, a red tree delivers those back to Panasonic and other customers. But the company expanded beyond recycling and cathode production. Redwood generated $ 200 million in revenue In 2024. Much of this comes from the sale of battery materials such as cathodes.
It also grew, and far more than its Carson City, Nevada headquarters while locked up agreements with Toyota, Panasonic and GM, began construction on South Carolina factoryand Acquisition in Europe.
Redwood Energy is the next step that is not bound to set up its systems to be out of grid. The retired EV batteries can be powered by wind and solar, or it can be attached to the grid. In the case of the Crusoe project, it is operated by solar.
“There is no need for green intention here,” CTO Colin Campbell said during a tour of the Microgrid. “It’s a good economic choice that is also without carbon.”
For more than a decade, companies have promised to build grid-scale storage from used EV batteries, but they have only materialized in small quantities. Redwood, which has begun its start as battery material and recycling, creates a new business line, which promises to deliver giguats of much -needed energy storage in just a few years.
“This really proves how economical the garbage is the hierarchy,” Jessica Dunn, a battery expert at the Union of Careful Scientists, told Techcrunch. That a great recycler like Redwood recognized the profit potential in reprinted EV batteries show “where this end of life market will,” she added.
Redwood was founded to build a supply chain that could handle the expected wave of used EV batteries that will hit the market. But that wave did not come true as quickly as some predicted.
Replaying batteries is a clear trading opportunity for Redwood, but it may also be a business imperative.
“If Redwood didn’t enter the repurposing market, then they wouldn’t get part of the repulsed battery. They’ll have to wait for the five, ten, 15 years until they retired.” she said. In the meantime, other companies could sell the batteries for grid-scale storage, cutting Redwood from years of revenue.
Straubel acknowledged this, noticing in an interview that in many ways Redwood materials started a little early.
“We started really early, and in a way we started Redwood almost too early,” he said, realizing that the company initially collected consumer batteries and production scratches before the next wave of EVs.
“Right now, the recycling market is mostly manufacturing scrapes, consumer electronics and EV batteries that have failed under warranty,” Dunn said. That was enough for Redwood to process over 20 Gigawatt hours a year, but it feels compared to the 350 Gigawatt hours in EVs today and the 150 Gigawatt hours expected to hit the road every year.
Redwood currently has a recycle facility on its 175-acre campus in Sparks, Nevada, and it develops 600-acre facility in Charleston, South Carolina. This -last will reshape a cathode and anode copper sheet, both of which contain critical minerals, which the United States would prefer to stay within its limits.
The company previously said it will be able to do 100 Gigawatt hours annually from cathode active material and an anode sheet at the end of this year. By the end of the decade, it is expected that production will hit 500 gigavata hours.
