The occasion marked the launch of the corporate’s new enterprise line, Redwood Power, which is able to initially repurpose (somewhat than recycle) batteries with years of remaining life to create renewable-powered microgrids. Such small-scale vitality programs can function on or off the bigger electrical energy grid, offering electrical energy for companies or communities.
Redwood Supplies says most of the batteries it takes in for processing retain greater than half their capability.
“We will extract much more worth from that materials by utilizing it as an vitality storage mission earlier than recycling it,” JB Straubel, Redwood’s founder and chief government, mentioned on the occasion.
This primary microgrid, housed on the firm’s facility within the Tahoe Reno Industrial Heart, 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 programs. That energy flows to Crusoe, a cryptocurrency miner that pivoted into creating AI information facilities, which has constructed a facility with 2,000 graphics processing models adjoining to the lot of repurposed EV batteries.
(That’s tiny as trendy information facilities go: Crusoe is creating a $500 billion AI information middle for OpenAI and others in Abilene, Texas, the place it expects to put in 100,000 GPUs throughout its first two amenities by the tip of the yr, in accordance with Forbes.)
Redwood’s mission underscores a rising curiosity in powering information facilities partially or completely exterior the electrical grid. Not solely would such microgrids be faster to construct than typical energy crops, however client ratepayers wouldn’t be on the hook for the price of new grid-connected energy crops developed to serve AI information facilities.
Since Redwood’s batteries are used, and have already been faraway from autos, the corporate says its microgrids also needs to be considerably cheaper than ones assembled from new batteries.
COURTESY REDWOOD MATERIALS
Redwood Power’s microgrids may generate electrical energy for any form of operation. However the firm stresses they’re a super 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 because of the ravenous urge for food of AI, in accordance with an April report by the Worldwide Power Company.
“Storage is that this completely positioned expertise, particularly low-cost storage, to assault every of these issues,” Straubel says.
