Ever since electric cars first hit the market, a little more than 10 years ago, there has been one overriding question posed by all those with doubts about the electric vehicle (EV) revolution – how much is it going to cost me to replace the battery?
It’s a question which – still – has no definitive answer, for two reasons. One, it’s not quite the right question to ask, as batteries are proving to be far more robust and long-lived than was ever originally thought possible, and equally batteries are designed so that, for the most part, if something does go wrong, you replace a module – a section of the battery – rather than the whole thing.
Equally, the lack of a definitive answer is in no small part down to carmakers obfuscating and ducking the question. Doubtless, this is in an effort to try not to spook potential electric car buyers with big numbers but equally, it leaves a large information gap in the market which allows others to spread ignorance and misinformation.
However, we can now give at least in part a definitive answer as to how much it’s going to cost you to replace or upgrade the battery pack of one specific car. That car in question is the original Mk1 Nissan Leaf, the cost is €7,000, which can be further discounted if you’re trading in the car’s original battery to be used as a static storage device.
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The Leaf battery swap is the brainchild of Co Kildare-based Range Therapy. One of the company’s founders, Eamon Stack, told The Irish Times the idea behind the business is not specifically the improvement of old Nissans, but the creation of a core of power storage for Ireland.
“Our main mission is motivated by and one of the greatest needs for tackling climate change is energy storage. Energy storage is expensive stuff, but it turns out that second-life batteries from EVs have a potential 20 years of service still left in them, and so our main thing is to make that a reality for people.
“One of the big motivations is that we generate a large surplus of electricity during the night, and the difficulty is we’ve nowhere to store it. In fact we wasted, or didn’t use, enough electricity last year to power Co Galway for two years. There’s one terawatt hour of energy that just was unused. We’ve got the generation capacity. We’ve got the distribution network, but with nowhere to put it. So we’re saying it should be a national strategy to have a programme whereby second-life EV batteries are actually used for storage for as long as they remain healthy.”
As Stack points out, even older Leaf batteries – the original 24kWh version – are seriously high-quality pieces of electrical engineering art, and are staggeringly robust and resistant to wear and tear. So while they might have lost the top end of their power storage needed for a road-going car, as a static storage battery to attach to a house, or as backup power for a farm or small industrial unit, they’re ideal.
Of course, what Stack – and his partner in the business, Barry McMahon – then realised, was that the batteries were often coming out of cars which were in themselves still perfectly good.
“I originally had an electric motorbike, which used old-style nickel batteries. Those ran out, but I found that I could pretty easily replace them with more modern lithium-ion batteries, which also doubled the range of the bike. So I did that with my bike, then I did another four or five, and one of those belonged to a colleague, Barry McMahon and that started both of us thinking about the whole idea of using older batteries as storage.”
As Stack notes, the idea of upgrading an older electric car and keeping it on the road is a nice idea, but it’s really more of a happy side benefit to the greater need to create energy storage to try to balance out the national power grid.
However, that happy side benefit is allowing older Leafs not merely to stay on the road rather than heading to the scrap heap, but it’s also giving them a new lease of life. That’s because more energy-dense battery packs from newer versions of the Leaf can, more or less, fit into the same space vacated by the old 24kWh battery, so you can upgrade to 40kWh, 62kWh, or even 70kWh battery packs. Stack says that these batteries are harvested from crashed and written off cars, of which there is a faintly depressingly regular supply.
One person who has had their old Leaf upgraded is Hannah Daly, Professor in Sustainable Energy at University College Cork, and a noted commentator on environmental issues.
Daly brought her old 24kWh Mk1 Leaf to Range Therapy, and shortly afterwards drove back out again with a new 70kWh battery, giving the Leaf a potential range of up to 475km on one charge – something that the 160km ranged original could never have even thought about.
“It’s worth mentioning – after reading reactions and misunderstandings on social media – that battery swaps won’t really be needed on newer EVs, and that I didn’t do the swap because my older battery failed; it was still at 83 per cent health. I did it to take advantage of newer battery technology,” says Daly.
“The car itself is fantastic to drive, which is one of the reasons I made the investment. I’m not ‘into cars’ so I can’t give you any more specifics than this, but Mk1 Leaf drivers tend to be very fond of their cars. It has most of the features you get in a standard new model like heated seats and steering wheel, reversing camera, a timer for charging so it charges mainly on very cheap EV rates and a heater timer. I can fit two kids’ bikes in the boot.
“As you know, there is much less wear and tear on EVs so it’s been very reliable. I hope and plan to get another 10-20 years from this car. At that point, the battery will still likely have most of its capacity, so can be repurposed, refurbished, and eventually nearly all of the materials in it can be recycled so we won’t have to mine new lithium and so on.”
Daly will also be keeping her original 24kWh battery, which will be repurposed as a storage power wall for her home.
Stack says that for the moment, it’s only Nissan Leafs for which Range Therapy can perform battery upgrades. “In terms of the energy storage, we can take batteries from any car. But actually putting batteries back into a car, you need to know the Can codes of the car, and they’re not always available. That is the key.” Equally, it seems that for most EVs, batteries are simply not yet degrading to the point where a replacement would be worthwhile. It just happens that Leafs are the oldest electric cars on the market, and so are the ones which have racked up the most wear and tear.
Nonetheless, as Stack says, the cars themselves have a potential 500,000km life cycle so what would be the point of throwing them away just because the battery has become worn? While €7,000 isn’t exactly pocket change (and upgrading to a bigger battery costs more again) it’s also not out of line with what you’d spend to replace a blown engine on an internal combustion car, or even in some cases simply replace broken-down electronic engine management black boxes. Indeed, it’s not even out of line with what you might have to spend to trade up from an older car to a new one.
Beyond this there really is a huge imperative to get on with the process of not merely selling electric cars to drivers, but also to integrating the electric car and its component parts into Ireland’s energy plan – even into society – as a whole.
“When we get up to say, a million EVs on Irish roads, and obviously we don’t know when we’ll reach that target, but we would estimate 50,000 second-hand batteries becoming available every single year on this little island. So what are we going to do with those 50,000 batteries?” asks Stack. “So there will be batteries, very valuable batteries. That’s a huge amount of storage that we could use for all the surplus electricity we generate at night. So you completely change the market, and you take a huge burden off the grid at peak, because you’re using your batteries to power your houses during the day.”
Stack and McMahon are also, in a small way thus far, getting ahead of the game that the big carmakers are planning – recycling and rejuvenating, rather than replacing a car. BMW, for example, already has plans in place for a process of taking a used car and reviving its interior, its trim, its battery, and crucially its software, returning it to the original owner as effectively as a new vehicle, but one which has not had to be built from scratch.
Well, the ambition of one of the world’s biggest carmakers is already being realised from a start-up in Co Kildare.
