Inside The World's Largest Battery Recyling Operation - The Redwood Materials Factory Tour

TL;DR

• 1

  Redwood says it processes roughly 70% of US end-of-life lithium-ion batteries: Straubel estimates Redwood receives tens of gigawatt-hours of batteries per year, equivalent to hundreds of thousands of cars and tens of thousands of tons of material.

• 2

  The company now makes money without federal subsidies: Straubel says Redwood only became robustly positive-margin in the last 6 to 12 months, after process improvements, better recoveries, lower impurities, and enough scale to compete directly with mining.

• 3

  Battery recycling starts with a custom low-oxygen heating system, not dramatic smelting: Redwood's RC1 line heats batteries to several hundred degrees Celsius in an inert atmosphere to safely discharge them, remove electrolyte and adhesives, and prep them for mechanical separation without melting metals.

• 4

  Second-life batteries became a major business because EV packs are arriving earlier and healthier than expected: More than half of Redwood's incoming material is now large EV packs, and many are good enough for stationary storage even if they no longer meet a car's performance requirements.

• 5

  Redwood built its own power electronics to turn mismatched used EV packs into one storage system: Each reused pack gets a custom DC-to-DC converter and software layer so different batteries can be controlled independently instead of being wired together like identical new cells.

• 6

  The company is pitching battery reuse as AI infrastructure: At its Nevada site, second-life batteries paired with solar are powering modular Crusoe data centers running NVIDIA GPU workloads, and Straubel says the storage can keep them running for nearly two to three days without diesel generators.