Moment Energy: The World's Largest EV Battery Upcycling Site

Canadian clean energy firm Moment Energy has announced it will complete what it claims will be the world's largest battery repurposing facility in Vancouver, British Columbia, within the next six weeks.

The facility, which the company is calling a "megafactory", is expected to be fully operational by the end of June.

The announcement follows a US$40m Series B funding round, bringing total capital raised for the project to more than US$100m.

That impressive figure speaks to the ever-growing appetite for energy storage technology, even if questions remain about the pace at which supplies of second-life batteries can be rolled out.

"This is about building the infrastructure needed to support the next generation of energy demand," says Edward Chiang, the Co-Founder and CEO of Moment Energy.

"We are proud to establish this facility in Canada, the country where Moment Energy was founded, to foster domestic manufacturing.

"This scaling solution utilises existing battery resources to deliver the reliable, affordable power that is so crucial right now," he adds.

What the facility will actually do

The Vancouver site is designed as a vertically integrated operation, handling every stage from battery intake and testing through to integration and deployment.

For this project, Moment Energy's plan is to repurpose old batteries from electric vehicles and refurbish them for use in commercial-scale energy storage systems.

To further boost the sustainability of the initiative, Moment is looking to only use batteries from North America, keeping the supply chain small and the air miles low.

The company says the facility will be one of only a handful globally to operate with a UL 1974 certification – a safety standard specific to the repurposing of used batteries.

By 2030, Moment Energy expects the site to reach a capacity of 1GWh, while the firm also projects that the megafactory will create 100 skilled jobs.

Making batteries a circular economy

The logic behind the megafactory is very straightforward.

EV batteries have a fairly short lifespan – somewhere between 10 to 20 years – which means that thousands of batteries from the EV boom of the 2010s are now becoming obsolete.

Hundreds of gigawatt-hours of EV batteries are expected to reach the end of their automotive life over the coming decade, and repurposing them for stationary storage is both cheaper and faster than manufacturing new cells from scratch.

It is a market that is grabbing a lot of attention, though commercialisation at scale is still a challenge.

Battery condition, chemistry and degradation all vary considerably between vehicles, which can make sorting and testing a very resource-intensive process.

That said, Moment Energy says that it already has systems deployed in data centres, hospitals, factories and microgrids across North America and counts Mercedes-Benz Energy among its supplier partners.

What this could mean for North America's data centre sector

The data centre angle of this initiative is not to be underestimated.

Over the past few years, the data centre sector has become one of North America's fastest growing verticals, and powering these facilities in a sustainable manner is a constant consideration across boardrooms and public offices.

Power availability has become a tangible constraint for data centre operators and industrial customers, particularly as the buildout of AI infrastructure drives electricity demand upward at a rate that grid expansion alone is unlikely to match in the near term.

Second-life battery systems can be an important piece of that puzzle.

By offering data centres a solution for energy storage without all the long waiting times associated with new battery manufacturing or large-scale grid projects, Moment could effectively skip the queue and become an important partner for data centre operators.

With just six weeks until the megafactory is scheduled for completion, the EV, data centre and energy sectors will all be watching carefully.