Moment Energy gives a second life to spent EV batteries

The British Columbia-based startup creates custom BESS using retired modules from Nissan and Mercedes-Benz and is gearing to launch large-scale manufacturing.

From ESS News

For four engineering students at Simon Fraser University, how to dispose of end-of-life electric vehicle batteries was a question they couldn’t quite shake. The long-time friends had wanted to start a company for years, and changing the fate of spent lithium-ion batteries seemed a great place to start.

“We saw a problem,” Gurmesh Sidhu, the chief product officer and one of the four co-founders of Moment Energy, told ESS News. The Canadian startup repurposes retired EV batteries into second-life stationary energy storage systems. “Various recyclers told us it would cost around $4,000 at the time for someone to recycle their own Chevy Bolt battery, for example.”

Sidhu, along with now CEO Edward Chiang, CTO Gabriel Soares and COO Sumreen Rattan, decided to find a more sustainable solution for used batteries — many of which still retain up to 80% of their capacity, according to a report from Aviloo and the P3 Group. Yet they were being discarded or underutilized.

More recently, the company secured a $15 million Series A funding round to build its second factory overall and its first manufacturing plant in the United States.

The buildout of the new gigafactory, which will be located in Taylor, Texas, will also be supported by a $20.3 million award by the U.S. Department of Energy and is expected to create over 250 skilled clean energy jobs.

Read the full story on our ESS News website