Redwood Energy adapts the company’s original mission — breaking down spent batteries to recover, refine, and resell critical minerals — to suit the data center revolution. Instead of merely extracting battery materials, the company can now also repurpose electric vehicle batteries that still have some life left in them as energy storage solutions for AI data centers, allowing Redwood to get value from the battery throughout its lifecycle.
“Regardless of where lithium prices are, if we can put [a lithium-ion battery] in a large-scale energy storage system, it can have a lot more value before we break it down into critical materials,” Claire McConnell, Redwood’s new VP of business development for energy storage, told me.
Over the past 12 to 18 months, she explained that the company had started to receive more and more used electric vehicle battery packs “in better condition than we initially anticipated.” Given the substantial electricity load growth underway, McConnell said the company saw it as “perfect moment” to “develop something that could be really unique for that market.”
At the time of Redwood Energy’s launch last June, the company announced that it had stockpiled over a gigawatt-hour of used EV batteries, with an additional 5 gigawatt-hours expected over the following year. Its first microgrid pilot is already live and generating revenue in Sparks, Nevada, operating in partnership with the data center owner and operator Crusoe Energy. That project is off-grid, supplying solar-generated electricity directly to Crusoe’s data center. Future projects could be grid-connected though, storing energy when prices are low and dispatching it when there are spikes in demand.
The company also isn’t limiting itself to used battery packs, McConnell told me. Plenty of manufacturers, she said, are sitting on a surplus of new batteries that they’re willing to offload to Redwood. The potential reasons for that glut are easy to see: already-slower-than-expected EV adoption compounded by Trump’s rollback of incentives has left many automakers with lower than projected EV sales. And even in the best of times, automakers routinely retool their product lines, which could leave them with excess inventory from an older model.
While McConnell wouldn’t reveal what percent of packs are new, she did tell me they make up a “pretty meaningful percentage of our inventory right now,” pointing to a recently announced partnership with General Motors meant to accelerate deployment of both new and used battery packs for energy storage.
While Redwood isn’t abandoning its battery recycling roots, this shift in priorities toward data center energy storage comes after a tough few years for the battery recycling sector overall. By last June, lithium prices had fallen precipitously from their record highs in 2022, making mineral recycling far less competitive. Then came Trump’s cuts to consumer electric vehicle incentives, further weakening demand. On top of that, the rise of lithium-iron phosphate batteries — which now dominate the battery storage sector and are increasingly common in EVs — have reduced the need for nickel and cobalt in particular, as they’re not a part of this cheaper battery chemistry.
All this helped create the conditions for the bankruptcy of one of Redwood’s main competitors, Li-Cycle, in May 2025. The company went public via a SPAC merger in 2021, aiming to commercialize its proprietary technique for shredding whole lithium-ion battery packs at once. But it ultimately couldn’t secure the funds to finish building out its recycling hub in Rochester, New York, and it was acquired by the commodities trading and mining company Glencore last summer.
“We started really early, and in a way we started Redwood almost too early,” JB Straubel, Redwood’s founder and Tesla’s co-founder, told TechCrunch last summer. He was alluding to the fact that in 2017, when Redwood was founded, there just weren’t that many aging EVs on the road — nor are there yet today. So while an influx of used EV batteries is eventually expected, slower than anticipated EV adoption means there just may not be enough supply yet to sustain a company like Redwood on that business model alone.
In the meantime, Redwood has also worked to recycle and refine critical minerals from battery manufacturing scrap and used lithium-ion from consumer electronics. Partnerships with automakers such as Toyota, Volkswagen, and General Motors, as well as global battery manufacturer Panasonic, have helped bolster both its EV battery recycling business and new storage endeavor. The goal of building a domestic supply chain for battery materials such as lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper also remains as bipartisan as ever, meaning Redwood certainly isn’t dropping the recycling and refining arm of its business, even as it shifts focus toward energy storage.
For instance, it’s also still working on the buildout of a recycling and battery component production facility in Charleston, South Carolina. While three years ago the company announced that this plant would eventually produce over 100 gigawatt-hours of cathode and anode battery components annually, operations on this front appear to be delayed. When Redwood announced that recycling and refining operations had begun in Charleston late last year, it made no mention of when battery component production would start up.
It’s possible that this could be taking a backburner to the company’s big plans to expand its storage business. While the initial Crusoe facility offers 63 megawatt-hours of battery energy storage, McConnell told me that Redwood is now working on projects “in the hundreds of megawatt-hours, looking to gigawatt-hour scale” that it hopes to announce soon.
The market potential is larger than any of us might realize. Over the next five or so years, McConnell said, “We expect that repurposed electric vehicle battery packs could make up 50% of the energy storage market.”
Workers assemble Volkswagen's ID.3 electric car on a production line at German car factory. Jens Schlueter/Getty Images
