The event marked the launch of the company's new line of business, Redwood Energy. RedwoodEnergy first reuses batteries with a long-lasting lifespan (rather than recycled) to create renewable microgrids. Such small energy systems operate on or outside the larger power grid, providing electricity to businesses and communities.
Redwood's materials say that many of the batteries they incorporate into the process hold more than half of their capacity.
“By using it as an energy storage project, we can extract more value from that material,” said JB Straubel, founder and CEO of Redwood, at the event.
The first microgrid at the company's facility at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center will be one of the largest systems in the country, with solar panels being able to generate 64 megawatt-hour power. That power flows to Crusoe, a cryptocurrency miner who pivoted to the development of an AI data center that built a facility with 2,000 graphics processing units adjacent to many recycled EV batteries.
(As modern data centers go, it's small: Crusoe is developing Openai and other $500 billion AI data centers in Abilene, Texas, and expects to install 100,000 GPUs in its first two facilities by the end of the year. Forbes. )
The Redwood project highlights the growing interest in powering data centers part or entirely outside the electric grid. Such microgrids will not only be constructed faster than traditional power plants, but also have no consumer payers on the hook due to the costs of new grid-connected power plants developed to serve AI data centers.
As Redwood's batteries are in use and have already been removed from the vehicle, the company says the microgrids should also be significantly cheaper than those assembled from the new battery.
Courtesy Redwood material
Redwood Energy's microgrids can generate power for any type of operation. However, the company emphasizes that it is ideally suited to address the growing energy needs and climate emissions of data centers. According to an April report by the International Energy Agency, energy consumption at such facilities could double by 2030, mainly due to the greedy appetite of AI.
“Storage is this fully deployed technology, especially low-cost storage, to attack each of these issues,” Straubel says.
