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The occasion marked the launch of the corporate’s new enterprise line, Redwood Energy, which is able to initially repurpose (reasonably than recycle) batteries with years of remaining life to create renewable-powered microgrids. Such small-scale vitality methods can function on or off the bigger electrical energy grid, offering electrical energy for companies or communities.
Redwood Materials says most of the batteries it takes in for processing retain greater than half their capability.
“We can extract a lot more value from that material by using it as an energy storage project before recycling it,” JB Straubel, Redwood’s founder and chief government, stated on the occasion.
This first microgrid, housed on the firm’s facility within the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, is powered by photo voltaic panels and able to producing 64 megawatt-hours of electrical energy, making it one of many nation’s largest such methods. That energy flows to Crusoe, a cryptocurrency miner that pivoted into creating AI knowledge facilities, which has constructed a facility with 2,000 graphics processing items adjoining to the lot of repurposed EV batteries.
(That’s tiny as trendy knowledge facilities go: Crusoe is creating a $500 billion AI knowledge heart for OpenAI and others in Abilene, Texas, the place it expects to put in 100,000 GPUs throughout its first two amenities by the top of the 12 months, in line with Forbes.)
Redwood’s venture underscores a rising curiosity in powering knowledge facilities partially or solely outdoors the electrical grid. Not solely would such microgrids be faster to construct than typical energy vegetation, however client ratepayers wouldn’t be on the hook for the price of new grid-connected energy vegetation developed to serve AI knowledge facilities.
Since Redwood’s batteries are used, and have already been faraway from autos, the corporate says its microgrids must also be considerably cheaper than ones assembled from new batteries.
COURTESY REDWOOD MATERIALS
Redwood Energy’s microgrids may generate electrical energy for any sort of operation. But the corporate stresses they’re a really perfect match for addressing the rising vitality wants and local weather emissions of knowledge facilities. The vitality consumption of such amenities may double by 2030, primarily as a result of ravenous urge for food of AI, in line with an April report by the International Energy Agency.
“Storage is this perfectly positioned technology, especially low-cost storage, to attack each of those problems,” Straubel says.