Charged EVs | Rivian and Redwood deploy 10 MWh of second-life battery storage at Illinois factory

Rivian and Redwood Materials are deploying 10 megawatt-hours of second-life battery storage at Rivian’s manufacturing facility in Normal, Illinois. The system uses more than 100 retired Rivian battery packs and is described as the largest repurposed battery energy storage system for a US automotive manufacturer.

Redwood is integrating the used packs into a stationary setup—called a Redwood Energy system—managed by the company’s Redwood Pack Manager technology. The stored energy dispatches on-site during peak demand periods, letting Rivian draw on its own retired packs instead of purchasing more grid power. Both companies say the system is rapidly scalable as more retired packs become available.

EV battery packs are engineered to far outlast the vehicles they power, designed for many hundreds of thousands of miles and often still healthy when a car is retired. Repurposing those packs as stationary storage extends their useful life before recycling and defers the need for costly new infrastructure. Redwood’s pitch is that the US already holds a growing domestic stockpile of these packs, and converting them to dispatchable energy is faster than building new storage capacity from scratch.

“Our partnership with Redwood enables us to utilize our vehicle’s batteries beyond the life of a vehicle and contribute to grid health and American competitiveness,” said RJ Scaringe, Rivian Founder and CEO.

Redwood’s JB Straubel focused on the infrastructure gap: “Electricity demand is accelerating faster than the grid can expand, posing a constraint on industrial growth…Our partnership with Rivian shows how EV battery packs can be turned into dispatchable energy resources, bringing new capacity online quickly, supporting critical manufacturing, and reducing strain on the grid without waiting years for new infrastructure.”

Source: Rivian