Rivian and Redwood Materials Are Turning Old Battery Packs Into Factory Power in Normal

Rivian and Redwood Materials announced a partnership to deploy a battery energy storage system at the Normal plant using more than 100 second-life Rivian battery packs. The system holds 10 megawatt-hours of energy that Rivian can pull from during peak demand instead of buying expensive grid power.

Redwood is handling the integration with its Pack Manager technology, and the companies are claiming this is the largest repurposed battery energy storage system at any U.S. auto manufacturer.

The idea behind it is pretty straightforward. EV batteries are built to last a long time, and a lot of them still have plenty of usable capacity when a vehicle gets retired. Putting those packs to work at the factory rather than scrapping them early is a practical way to cut costs and reduce grid load at the same time.

JB Straubel, who co-founded Tesla before starting Redwood, was pretty blunt about the motivation: electricity demand is growing faster than the grid can keep up, and that’s becoming a real constraint for industrial growth. This is one way to work around that without waiting for grid infrastructure to catch up.

RJ framed it around long-term thinking on energy, and scaling is apparently part of the plan. Worth keeping an eye on whether this expands beyond Normal.