Waymo's Spent Robotaxi Batteries Are Being Repurposed for Grid Storage
Waymo, the autonomous vehicle subsidiary of Alphabet, has announced a new partnership that puts its retired robotaxi battery packs to work long after they've left the road — as stationary energy storage for the electrical grid.
The deal, struck with California-based B2U Storage Solutions, will see Waymo's used battery packs repurposed into grid-scale storage systems rather than being sent to recycling facilities or landfills. It's a move that highlights a growing conversation in the clean energy sector: what happens to the enormous volume of EV batteries as the world's electric vehicle fleet ages?
Why This Matters
EV batteries don't simply stop working the moment a vehicle retires them. A battery pack that no longer holds enough charge to reliably power a car through hundreds of kilometres can still hold substantial energy — often 70 to 80 percent of its original capacity. That's more than enough to be useful in a stationary application where weight and range don't matter.
Grid storage systems use banks of batteries to absorb excess electricity when supply outpaces demand — say, on a sunny afternoon when solar panels are generating more power than people are using — and release it back to the grid during peak hours. For this purpose, a slightly degraded EV battery is perfectly suited.
B2U Storage Solutions has been pioneering exactly this kind of second-life battery approach. Rather than breaking down used EV packs into raw materials, which is energy-intensive and costly, the company installs them as-is into grid storage arrays. Their existing facility in California already uses repurposed EV batteries from other automakers.
The Scale of the Opportunity
Waymo currently operates a large fleet of autonomous Jaguar I-PACE vehicles and Zeekr robotaxis across cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin. As that fleet turns over — vehicles are cycled out for maintenance, upgrades, or end-of-life — the volume of retired battery packs will only grow.
The timing aligns with a broader industry challenge. Analysts estimate that millions of EV batteries will reach end-of-vehicle-life over the next decade, creating both a waste problem and a significant opportunity for the energy storage market. Repurposing even a fraction of those packs could meaningfully add to grid storage capacity at lower cost than manufacturing new stationary batteries from scratch.
A Circular Economy in Motion
The Waymo-B2U deal is one of the more concrete examples of the circular economy playing out in the clean tech sector. Instead of the traditional linear model — make, use, discard — battery packs travel from EV assembly line, to autonomous vehicle fleet, to grid storage deployment, before eventually being broken down for materials recycling.
For Waymo, the arrangement also offers a more sustainable narrative around its fleet operations, an area that has drawn scrutiny as critics question the true environmental footprint of running large autonomous vehicle fleets with the computing power they require.
For the grid, every additional megawatt-hour of storage capacity helps utilities manage the intermittency of renewable energy sources — making the transition away from fossil fuels a little smoother.
It's a quietly significant deal: the batteries that once ferried passengers around San Francisco may soon be keeping the lights on across California.
Source: TechCrunch