Building Confidence in the New Era of Electrification

Battery-powered electrification is a topic of focus for many UL Solutions customers and stakeholders worldwide. Businesses are considering the implementation implications arising in this new era of electrification and what that means for safe operations and their bottom line. Government officials are optimistic about battery-powered electrification’s economic growth potential while also considering potential safety and security concerns that might impact public well-being.

Cars, trucks, homes and factories all burn fossil fuels in countless engines, furnaces and boilers, creating pollution that heats the planet. The greenhouse gas emissions created by these machines add to climate change.  To reduce this impact, they could be replaced with cars, heating systems and factories that run on clean sources of electricity like wind, solar and power plants for the electric grid.

But electrifying everything is a daunting task. It would mean replacing millions of gasoline-powered cars and home appliances that run on natural gas. Electrification also requires sweeping changes to the nation’s power grids so that all those newly electrified cars and buildings don’t strain the system and cause blackouts.

How do batteries fit into this equation? If electrification is key to decarbonizing the world and fighting climate change, batteries will become a crucial power source and storage arena for a sustainable energy future. However, batteries must demonstrate safety, reliability and performance.

At the groundbreaking ceremony for the UL Solutions North America Advanced Battery Laboratory in Auburn Hills, Michigan, four individuals with unique perspectives about the electrification supply chain and the innovation necessary behind new testing, engineering and certification practices came together to address electric vehicle and industrial battery market priorities:

• Kenneth Boyce, senior director, Principal Engineering, Industrial, UL Solutions
• Robert L. Galyen, senior strategic consultant and adviser, Galyen Energy
• Taylor Hansen, president, Webasto Thermo & Comfort, North America Inc.
• Mary Joyce, vice president and general manager, Mobility and Critical Systems, UL Solutions

Discover their answers to timely questions about battery-powered electrification.

Kenneth Boyce: What are the risks or concerns for the transition to renewable energy systems, and how do we effectively mitigate these risks?

Bob Galyen: There are five golden rules of electrification, and UL Solutions supports them quite vociferously — safety, performance, life, cost, and environmental. All of those technologies mentioned before have to follow the five golden rules. The preservation of human health and life is so critical, plus protection of assets is essential — all elements of the safety theme. If we don’t pass that safety gate, it’s game over.

Many of the performance characteristics are related to safety. If you’re accelerating to get onto the freeway and an 18-wheeler is coming up behind you at 80 miles per hour, you need power to accelerate. Or if you or a family member is sick and you’re trying to get them to the hospital, you need good energy levels in that battery. So energy and power are essential, but shock, vibration, temperature range, electromagnetic behavior, and so on are just a few of the performance characteristics needed in a battery.

Taylor Hansen: I would agree with Bob that [for batteries], it certainly is important to meet the application requirements. For instance, we discussed sodium-ion batteries, which might become accessible but perhaps not in the immediate future. I’d categorize solid-state batteries similarly.

If battery chemistries were to change to make batteries more sustainable, renewable, and recyclable, that would remove some of the risks and concerns with some of the next-generation batteries. But what can we do to make our supply chain for these materials more sustainable?

Let’s compare lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP) to nickel, manganese, and cobalt (NMC). Cobalt, in particular, is not very sustainable, as 75% of the cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There, you see artisanal mines where people are digging with their hands. It’s very toxic, and the labor practices can be questionable. Is that sustainable? If you’re looking at human health and safety and where the materials come from, perhaps not. 

There are other materials, such as iron, that are readily available everywhere. 

Kenneth Boyce: We’re thinking more and more about moving from that take-make-waste linear progression to more circular pathways to extend the life of resources and assets. What do manufacturers need to know about the circular economy of batteries to optimize their impact?

Taylor Hansen: The concept of a circular economy for batteries should be on the radar of every battery cell, module, and pack supplier, as well as original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). It could include recycling batteries down to their smallest constituents, or it could include using them in a second-life application. True circularity is not yet possible, but any level of reuse or recycling can certainly reduce mining — but not eliminate it — over time as more second-life batteries and applications become available. Second life is a great application, but you have to understand what the first life was like. In a vehicle, for example, it’s high-power, high-discharge, high-charge. You generally run them down to about 80% useful life as an industry standard. Assuming they weren’t abused and you can track how they were used, then perhaps it’s applicable for a second life, in which case you might manage it down to 60% or 40% useful life.

Another application for recycled batteries is in microgrids. You can have microgrids of any size. You can have them attached to a building to help with demand balancing for self-consumption optimization. If you’re consuming power at the peak cost period of the day, you’re able to pull from the batteries to supplement that and then recharge the batteries later in the day. Webasto exemplifies these concepts at two of our facilities. One of Webasto’s facilities implements a system to help with demand balancing. The other facility has a system with photovoltaic cells. It’s charging a bank full of second-life batteries to use with Webasto’s alternating current (AC) wall boxes. These batteries can be charged using solar energy from the photovoltaic cells, and if photovoltaic is not available, the batteries will charge from the grid.

But second-life usage is not everything. Depending on the first life, it may be determined that the best thing for the battery is to recycle it. How sustainable is the battery in terms of its remanufacture? If you were going to pull modules out, can the battery housing be reused in a remanufactured battery? Another consideration is designing batteries for recyclability or second-life use. How easily can they be removed from the vehicle? For example, do they fit a particular form factor that might allow them to fit easily into a container? In the car industry, there’s a lot of interest in having the battery pack as part of a structural member of the vehicle. In the commercial vehicle space, you may see more standardization of pack sizes. We’re a long way from being a circular economy, but it should be a strategy for anyone in the battery space or the vehicle space.

Kenneth Boyce: We’ve seen exponential growth in electric vehicle deployment. There’ll be some lag before we see the same exponential growth in batteries becoming available for second-life applications. The gap is a little longer than most people expect.

Taylor Hansen: A first-life application might be eight years. If you put it in a microgrid and it’s an easier use case, it may have a 10-year life. By the time you get around to recycling, the battery is 20 years old. How relevant will today’s battery chemistry be in 20 years? Will there be a market for cobalt for recycling as there is today? There might not be.

Kenneth Boyce: We led the technical development of UL 1974*, the Standard for that repurposing process to assess all those things in an appropriate fashion while also allowing for flexibility of processes that may focus on the entire battery pack, subassemblies, or different chemistries. There needs to be a rigorous, science-based assessment of the repurposing process’s safety and sustainability. It’s getting some interest, but we still have work to do collectively to have the right pathways available.

Mary Joyce: Data, or maybe lithium, is the next oil. Knowing the first life of the battery is going to be so crucial — and not just knowing enough to be able to create a car valuation that says this car is worth this much because the battery is worth that much. You have to have data to understand that battery at the cell level and even at the cooling level. For example, was the battery properly cooled during its entire life cycle? Were all of its cells and modules properly cooled? Were they overcharged at certain points? The data we need to increase safety the next life is more detailed than we have right now, or at least what is released over the onboard diagnostics (OBD) port or through other means. Focusing on that data is really crucial.

Kenneth Boyce: I think there are opportunities to optimize both the physical design and the data collection to make sure, going forward, we get just what we want.

Bob Galyen: You’re going to have a really hard time convincing the OEMs to give that data. They may not want to share that data because it has potential litigation around it. That is a real concern on their part. What Taylor was talking about is absolutely true. There’s a rough life expectancy of five years in commercial bus applications in China. We found out it was about a five-year lag because the bus wears out in approximately five years. It’s not the battery pack; it’s the bus. But the batteries are also worn to a point. Do you really want to use those batteries, or do you want to recycle them directly? So, there are business decisions that have to be made in typical passenger car applications around the definition of end of life. It’s more like 10 to 15 years of service, depending on how the driver drives the vehicle. It is also important to the value of recycling as to which type of cell it is that’s being recycled. Some new technologies being developed can be recycled cost-effectively, while some cannot. Recycling is getting recognition in the lithium world. China has already done it. There’s no question about it.

Learn more about how UL Solutions is helping established and emerging energy marketplaces meet growing demands while protecting people and the environment.

*UL 1974, the Standard for Evaluation for Repurposing Batteries