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On 10 September 2026, four pieces of second-life battery storage news landed on the same day. In Korea, a five-company consortium led by Hyundai Motor and Kia announced a pilot built around a 200kWh storage system assembled from used electric vehicle packs. The same day, Energy Storage News gathered progress reports from three second-life storage companies abroad into a single article. Read side by side, the four are not a ranking. Each sits at a different stage, and each is working through a different business structure at that stage. ...

Retired EV batteries are becoming a real option for powering AI data centers in the US. Redwood Materials, the battery-recycling company founded by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, built a 12-megawatt, 63-megawatt-hour microgrid at its Sparks, Nevada campus that pairs solar generation with retired-EV-battery storage, bringing it online in June 2025. A 20-acre solar array generates the power, and hundreds of retired EV battery packs store it for use after dark. When the microgrid first came online, the data center load it served was a modest 1 MW. ...

Three South Korean companies — EV diagnostics and logistics firm Wica Mobility, charging platform operator Softberry, and EV maintenance and battery remanufacturing company Futurex — signed a three-way strategic MOU on August 6 at Softberry’s headquarters to build what they’re calling the “K-EV Alliance.” The goal is to connect charging, diagnosis, maintenance, battery remanufacturing, and used-car resale into a single chain for EV owners. Each company has so far operated in a separate part of that chain. Wica Mobility runs its own diagnostic platform, WESCAN, which inspects vehicle condition, uses AI to estimate value, and handles vehicle transport and resale. Softberry operates the EV Infra charging platform, offering mobile reservations, payment, and electronic diagnostic reports and warranties. Futurex runs hub-based diagnostic centers that handle high-voltage battery replacement and powertrain maintenance, and operates Eco ChainX, a platform for remanufacturing used batteries. ...

“The sea is everything. Its breath is pure and healthy.” That is how Captain Nemo described the ocean in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. A century and a half later, that breath is not what it used to be. The climate is faltering, the planet is ailing, and it is the ocean that has absorbed most of the heat. We believe the recovery of the Earth begins with the recovery of the sea. And we believe healing the sea is not a matter of declarations, but of engineering: the technology to observe and understand the ocean, and the technology to circulate the energy we use, at sea and on land, more cleanly. ...