The occasion marked the launch of the corporate’s new enterprise line, Redwood Vitality, which can initially repurpose (relatively than recycle) batteries with years of remaining life to create renewable-powered microgrids. Such small-scale power methods can function on or off the bigger electrical energy grid, offering electrical energy for companies or communities.
Redwood Supplies says most of the batteries it takes in for processing retain greater than half their capability.
“We will extract much more worth from that materials through the use of it as an power storage challenge earlier than recycling it,” JB Straubel, Redwood’s founder and chief government, mentioned on the occasion.
This primary microgrid, housed on the firm’s facility within the Tahoe Reno Industrial Heart, is powered by photo voltaic panels and able to producing 64 megawatt-hours of electrical energy, making it one of many nation’s largest such methods. That energy flows to Crusoe, a cryptocurrency miner that pivoted into growing AI knowledge facilities, which has constructed a facility with 2,000 graphics processing models adjoining to the lot of repurposed EV batteries.
(That’s tiny as fashionable knowledge facilities go: Crusoe is growing a $500 billion AI knowledge heart for OpenAI and others in Abilene, Texas, the place it expects to put in 100,000 GPUs throughout its first two services by the tip of the 12 months, based on Forbes.)
Redwood’s challenge underscores a rising curiosity in powering knowledge facilities partially or totally exterior the electrical grid. Not solely would such microgrids be faster to construct than standard energy crops, however shopper ratepayers wouldn’t be on the hook for the price of new grid-connected energy crops developed to serve AI knowledge facilities.
Since Redwood’s batteries are used, and have already been faraway from automobiles, the corporate says its microgrids also needs to be considerably cheaper than ones assembled from new batteries.
COURTESY REDWOOD MATERIALS
Redwood Vitality’s microgrids might generate electrical energy for any form of operation. However the firm stresses they’re a super match for addressing the rising power wants and local weather emissions of information facilities. The power consumption of such services might double by 2030, primarily as a result of ravenous urge for food of AI, based on an April report by the Worldwide Vitality Company.
“Storage is that this completely positioned expertise, particularly low-cost storage, to assault every of these issues,” Straubel says.
