Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Gardiner of Kimble on 20 May (HL15733), what activity they are undertaking to explore second life applications for electric vehicle batteries which are no longer able to perform as required; what proportion of electric vehicle batteries would be diverted to secondary use; and what discussions they have had with industry and researchers on that topic.

The Government has directly supported energy storage through research and innovation funding. This support includes current funding from BEIS for an energy storage cost reduction project, led by Nissan Motor Manufacturing (UK) Ltd, which is looking at reducing the cost of stationary energy storage by developing cost effective, large-scale processes for grading and sorting 2^nd life Electric Vehicle batteries. This project is due to be completed by end March 2021.

There are several projects being funded as part of the Collaborative Research & Development (CR&D) activity of the Faraday Battery Challenge working on the development of the technical aspects of remanufacture and understanding the economic viability of using electric vehicle batteries for second life applications. These range in focus from diagnostic techniques to establish the suitability of batteries for a second life application and inform warranties for the second life devices, to developing effective methods of remanufacture which includes optimising the initial battery design for remanufacture. Second life applications are also a topic of research in the Faraday Institution (FI) supported Recycling of Lithium-Ion Batteries (ReLIB) project, with a cohort group established from the participants of the Collaborative Research & Development (CR&D) and FI recycling and second life projects to share learning in this area. The business cases for the types of electric vehicle batteries which are suitable both physically and from an economic perspective for second life applications are under development across the industry. These applications are dependent, among other factors, on the rapidly changing cost of new batteries and the value and efficiency of recovering the materials compared to the cost of remanufacture. Discussions are active with industry and researchers on this topic, both as part of the recycling and reuse cohort as well as conversations with companies and organisations across the UK, covering topics such as data handling and sharing to enable assessment of battery health at the end of EV life. The UK is also actively engaged in the World Economic Forum Global Battery Alliance and European Battery Alliance working groups in recycling and reuse.

These innovation projects exploring second life battery use will help to provide information on the proportion of electric vehicle batteries which could be cost-effectively diverted to secondary use.