Automakers say the batteries that power electric vehicles could provide a new way to store energy to help meet the growing electricity demand from data centers, artificial intelligence, transportation electrification and manufacturing reshoring.
Last month, Ford Motor Co.’s stock surged after it announced a plan to repurpose electric vehicle, or EV, batteries as energy storage systems for electric utilities and data centers. General Motors later followed suit with plans to develop a new type of battery that could support data centers and increase vehicle-to-grid capabilities.
Virginia Tech engineering experts Ali Mehrizi-Sani and Samji Samira explain how EV batteries could help power data centers and support the ever-increasing energy demands.
Why are EV batteries attracting so much attention in the power space right now?
“AI training and inference require far greater computational resources than traditional cloud computing and therefore much more electricity,” said Mehrizi-Sani, director of the Power and Energy Center at Virginia Tech. “Repurposed EV batteries offer a potentially lower-cost and already-available way to deploy energy storage.”
He added, “While an older battery may no longer meet the performance requirements of a vehicle, it can still provide valuable storage capacity in stationary applications. For data centers, these batteries can help shave peak demand and smooth large load variations.”
What makes lithium-ion and sodium-ion batteries ideal for power generation?
“Batteries enhance both reliability (preventing downtime and data loss) and resilience (enabling continued operation during power disruptions), making them an essential component of modern data centers,” said Samira, assistant professor of chemical engineering.
These batteries are ideal for use in data centers because they are efficient, have a high-energy density, a long lifespan, and have operational advantages over traditional lead-acid batteries.
“Lithium-ion batteries can store more data in a smaller footprint, and they have a long lifespan and high cycle life,” Samira said. “Think about a cell phone: An iPhone battery typically lasts four to six years before needing replacement. From a data center perspective, this reduces replacement frequency and maintenance costs.”
However, current lithium-ion technology is approaching its practical performance limits, particularly in terms of energy density, Samira added.
“The current generation of lithium-ion batteries has been extremely enabling for our society, which resulted in the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 for its inventors,” he said.. “Given the insatiable need of humanity and data centers to store more energy per unit mass, we will need to move beyond them.”