Repurposed Volt Batteries Power GM Data Center

General Motors Co. is using five used lithium-ion batteries from retired Chevrolet Volt electric vehicles to help power a new enterprise data center at the company's proving grounds in Milford, Mich.

GM and other automakers are looking for such secondary applications to help defer costs, utilize unspent energy storage capacity in post-vehicle batteries and boost the residual values of electrified vehicles.

Although costly to recycle, lithium-ion batteries can have has as much as 80% of their storage capacity left at the end of a typical vehicle's 10-year driving life, according to GM. The carmaker says secondary applications could extend a battery's useful life another decade.

At Milford, the Volt batteries in conjunction with a 74-kW solar array and two 2-kW wind turbines fully power the data center's administration building and lighting for an adjacent parking lot. Combined output for the renewable sources is about 100 MWh of energy per year, which GM notes is equivalent to the annual energy usage of 12 average U.S. households.

The batteries can provide four hours of backup power to the building in case of an outage. They also can store excess power and send it back to the electric grid that supplies the Milford campus. The Milford facility, which became operational earlier this year, is part of GM's plan to consolidate 23 data centers into two.

GM says it will study the Milford application to gain a better understanding of how batteries redistribute energy at this scale. It didn't say if or how much the system, which has been operational for a few weeks, would reduce the facility's energy costs.

GM is working with other companies to validate and test systems for additional commercial and non-commercial uses. It previously has partnered with Switzerland's ABB Group to develop such programs. GM also has used scrapped Volt battery covers for bat houses and as nesting boxes for endangered duck species.