Tesla's Co-Founder Showed Us His Battery Empire: The Redwood Materials Factory Tour

TL;DR

• 1

  Redwood says it sees roughly 70% of US end-of-life lithium-ion batteries: Straubel estimates Redwood receives tens of gigawatt-hours of batteries per year, or hundreds of thousands of cars equivalent, from dealers, OEMs, consumer aggregators, and other channels.

• 2

  The recycling business just crossed into real profitability: Straubel says Redwood has become a robustly positive-margin business only in the last 6 to 12 months, after improving recoveries, lowering impurities, and reaching enough scale to compete directly with mining without federal subsidies.

• 3

  Most of the work is not chemistry first, but controlled discharge plus mechanical separation: Redwood's RC1 line uses an oxygen-free, several-hundred-degrees-Celsius process to safely discharge batteries and remove electrolytes and adhesives before shredding and sorting out copper, aluminum, iron, and powder streams.

• 4

  Second-life EV packs became too good to scrap: As Redwood started receiving more large EV batteries, more than half of its inbound material by volume, it found many packs still had enough usable life for energy storage even if they were no longer ideal for cars.

• 5

  Redwood built its own battery-to-battery power electronics for storage: Because off-the-shelf gear did not fit the job, the company designed DC-to-DC pack managers that let mismatched used EV packs operate independently in one array, powering Crusoe modular data centers running NVIDIA GPU AI workloads.

• 6

  Nevada sped up what California likely would have slowed down: Straubel says the company could probably have been built in California, but much more slowly, while Nevada offered land, power, logistics, and a local government more willing to support large industrial buildouts.