One of the biggest challenges of the climate crisis is power. How do we harness it, store it, use it and most importantly, make it more sustainable.
Engineers have been creating fantastic solutions in power, but storing it is one of the biggest obstacles to overcome. Today we hear from an Irish engineer who is actively responding with some very clever solutions.
Our guest has worked with decarbonization at EU level and is leading his own social enterprise that creates energy storage solutions for homes, farms and small businesses. He is co-founder and Director of Range Therapy Eamon Stack.
THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT
- A new way of thinking about power supply and storage
- Second life batteries and how they can be utilised
- Using battery stored power in buildings, businesses, farms and home
- Creating a circular recycling programme for batteries in Europe
- Storing wind and solar power in batteries for cost effective power
GUEST DETAILS
Eamon Stack is an award-winning serial social entrepreneur. He co-founded Range Therapy in 2020, responding to the climate change crisis by focusing on reducing energy emissions, one of the big three human causes. Range Therapy offers second-life EV battery packs to upgrade older EVs and to offer substantial energy storage solutions at an affordable price for homes, farms and small businesses.
Eamon’s background is in software engineering, with 35 years development experience in the nonprofit sector. He was founder and former CEO at ENCLUDE for 18 years. This charity is focused on building the ICT capacity of the Irish Charity Sector.
MORE INFORMATION
Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/
Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.
QUOTES
After high powered use of a battery in a car for 15 or 20 years, they have another 20 years of life available to them as energy storage. - Eamon Stack
That's what's wonderful about the transition from an energy system where we just burn and waste fossil fuels to one that is perfectly circular and completely sustainable. This is really very good news for everybody in the system. - Eamon Stack
The Environmental Protection Agency might view a second life battery out of a car as a hazardous waste. That's a problem we need to deal with, this is a national asset. - Eamon Stack
It's a whole new world, and it's an exciting new world where there's a potential. The Holy Grail here is storage, we make tons of power, where can we store it at a price that makes sense. - Eamon Stack
KEYWORDS
#batteries #energy #cars #electric #engineers #grid #power #recycling #sustainability
TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription
Dusty Rhodes 00:01
Right now on AMPLIFIED, we find out how one engineer is fighting climate change by putting car batteries into buildings.
Eamon Stack 00:07
It's a whole new world and it's an exciting new world where there's a potential. You know, the Holy Grail here is storage. We make tons of power, where can we store it at a price that makes sense?
Dusty Rhodes 00:19
Hi there, my name is Dusty Rhodes and welcome to AMPLIFIED the Engineers Journal podcast. Three human causes are driving the change in our climate and as the people who design the future how engineers think about these causes is playing a vital role in the climate crisis solution. Today we're looking at one of those causes energy emission and speaking with an Irish engineer who is actively responding with some very, very clever solutions. He has worked at EU level creating a decarbonisation pathway with the ENCLUDE organization. And today, his Kildare based social enterprise helps extend the life of electric car batteries along with energy storage solutions for homes, farms and small businesses. It's a pleasure to welcome the co founder and director of Range Therapy, Eamon Stack, Eamon, how are you?
Eamon Stack 01:09
Great, delighted to be here Dusty and this is such an exciting moment, I think people would be interested in in this.
Dusty Rhodes 01:19
Listen, let's set the scene first, because we're all used to cars running on batteries at this stage. But with climate change and sustainability, front of mind in engineering design. Can you tell me more about Second Life batteries?
Eamon Stack 01:32
Yeah, I think this is something we might have missed that when we put you know, the Irish objective is to put a million electric cars on the road. Now the deadline was a little bit too soon, you know, half our cars, but to put to decarbonize transport, we need electric cars, there are brilliant engineering solution to the problem. People don't quite realize that yet. But what happens at the end of time, so every year at the minute, we're putting 20,000 electric cars on the road. And what happened to 20,000 batteries at the end of that life, the assumption was that they would go to recycling. But after a high powered use of a battery in a car for 15 or 20 years, they have another 20 years of life available to them as energy storage. And of course, that's the national problem. How do you store electricity, it's really expensive. We can't build more hydro electrics, we can't do the more pump Hydros. Like Turlock Hale, making hydrogen is a solution. It's it's very difficult and expensive and huge losses. But if we have batteries, and we own them already, why not use them to store our energy?
Dusty Rhodes 02:35
So what you're saying is we get 20 years life out of a battery that's in a car. But once that's done, there's another 20 years of life in that, how does it work? Well,
Eamon Stack 02:46
the car yeah, when you put down the accelerator in the car, you're demanding, you know, but 100 kilowatts of power from from a battery. And when you're charging at you might even be charging at 100 kilowatts, that's a heavy power node. And after 15 years, the lithium ion batteries tend to just get a bit tired of that high powered environment. But if you put them in a domestic setting, and better still, in a backup setting, there's very little power. So in a house, you put on the kettle under three kilowatts. And when you're charging overnight, you're charging at three or six kilowatts, it's a light load, you might use the analogy, it's a very happy retirement Pro, for a very valuable battery pack.
Dusty Rhodes 03:27
So you're also saying that because you're saying that they're talking about kettles, and houses and stuff like that, that they don't just necessarily are used with cars, but this second life can be adapted to buildings.
Eamon Stack 03:38
That's right, yes, for domestic energy storage for small enterprise storage. And then of course, for backup, I mean, traditionally, you would have a diesel or petrol generator as your electrical backup. And it's that that has to be kept maintained and running. Whereas if you had a solid state battery there as in its, if not no moving parts, it will sit there and hold the charge for years and will turn on instantly. That's the beauty of it, that you know, the power is available instantly. And then you move from that from you know, from centers. I remember credit unions talking about this, that they have legal obligations to have backup systems and then farms and hospitals so you know, these battery packs are invaluable. Or even I'm
Dusty Rhodes 04:21
thinking at festivals or if you're out for a walk in the park or whatever and you're you've you've got a van there the student fast food costs things like generators government, ruining your Paki day kind of kind of absolutely isn't that situation is just you have
Eamon Stack 04:33
your battery and we have that we call it the range trainer. You can pull it up, and it has lots of power and then you bring it home at night and charge it up for cheap. So it's much cheaper than the you know the litres of fuel that are used by a coffee shop. I think we were still about five times cheaper for the actual business. And then we have we were at the electric picnic and kind of thank God wouldn't it be great to change the diesel electric picnic to a real electric picnic where they're not using Isn't generators for power?
Dusty Rhodes 05:02
We'd show them kids a thing or two. Yes. But listen, I mean, it's great thinking about, you know, kind of vans or or houses or residential houses, can this solution actually be scaled up? How big can it go?
Eamon Stack 05:14
Well, if you think about the numbers of cars, so we've, we put 100,000 new cars on the road every year. So if we were putting 100,000 electric cars on the road every year, which we should be doing within 20 years, that means there's 100,000 batteries coming off the road every year. That's massive storage, like megawatts of storage, that that can be available. And we need to get that then into our energy ecosystem or National Energy ecosystem needs to program in how these these batteries are coming out of cars. And they're coming out two ways. It's surprising how many cars we crash that get written off, hopefully with nobody hearts. So we got a whole lot of batteries from from crashed cars, but then end of life cars and just say, Okay, here's a system now, where whereby we have 100,050 kilowatt hour storage units, which can give power at 100 megawatts, or 100 kilowatts each, like really powerful machines. And we have them available for our ecosystem, until we build, you know, a common wait for larger storages to put them in containers. And so you've got units of containers, and you build up a massive storage thing. So that the challenge the engineering challenge, is to plan this, this is going to happen anyway, let's learn how to do it and do it well, and do it safely and compliant. And then at the end of the cycle, so you have your new battery pack, then you have 20 years of that pack in the car, then you've got 20 years of storage, and then you have 98% recycling of all that material for a new battery pack. So you've got a perfect energy, circular economy. And we need to work this
Dusty Rhodes 06:57
out. And we're going with sustainability, the app completely sustainable model. Tell me a little bit about 98% recycling, how cuz? Well,
Eamon Stack 07:06
one of the great things about lithium batteries is the metals are in the batteries, and very light compounds are not complex. So you have two types of lithium batteries, you have the nickel based ones so that on the cathode side, you've got nickel, manganese, and cobalt. But there are three very valuable metals. And cobalt, lithium would be premium metals within the European Union that they want to preserve. But nickel is very valuable. So that's one sort of batteries. And then the other batteries are LFPS lithium iron phosphate batteries. And again, we wanted to get the lithium and the iron and reuse it. And then on the anode side of batteries, it's just carbon, it's just graphite. And again, most graphite is made in China now, because it's, it's not the cleanest of processes. So it seems logical, you keep all that stuff in Europe. And once we have it, we keep it and recycle it. And that's what's wonderful about the transition from an energy system where we just burn and waste fossil fuels to one that is perfectly circular, and completely sustainable. This is a really very good news for everybody in the system. And that's what we're on to promote. Now,
Dusty Rhodes 08:16
there is balance and everything there's good in this band is ying and yang. And everything you say about the batteries we're using today are good, what are the disadvantages of today's batteries?
Eamon Stack 08:26
I mean, the problem is they use a lot of resources to make them so we you know, Ireland needs to make enough batteries for 2 million cars isn't really no one. Yeah, I think it's 2 million cars we have on the road. So we need to make all those batteries. So there is an A cost a carbon cost of making the batteries, that's a negative. But that is completely offset by the fact that they can be completely recycled. So once we mined them once, we don't need to keep doing that. And once we get the manufacturing process, but the alternative is a filthy process of taking oil, heavy oil out of the ground, and then invest, you know, huge energy is required to crack oil and take and break it into its components. So the analysts say that the comparison and energy wise is about 400% better. So the electric electric car, for instance, will be 400% cheaper than the alternative and therefore it's not perfect, but at least it's subsidized four times better than the other. They sound
Dusty Rhodes 09:25
amazing. And I wanted to ask you about this because there are other types of batteries that are being developed those solid state batteries and then there's sodium ion batteries, what are you able to tell us about them and the advantages and disadvantages.
Eamon Stack 09:37
Solid State batteries the the attractiveness was to take the liquid electrolyte out of the battery, which is a volatile component. And in theory that's possible and they've made it for small devices. However they for scaling it they're having difficulties so so it's in process we might see in five or maybe 10 years time, if they can perfect it and get it onto the market. And then the advantage of solid state is they can charge very fast. That's the idea, maybe four times faster than the the equivalent lithium ion battery. So that's that's what they're going for. But I always say to people be very careful of products in development, because you don't know what's going to happen. And then when when, you know, when I was younger engineer, we were looking at, you know, is battery cars the way future? is hydrogen cars the way future or is there something else that's going to come 25 years on you realize hydrogen is a complete dud. It's a complete non engineering disaster. But But that's so it was it looked good 30 years ago, it's absolutely ridiculous solution today. So that's that in time you tell, what's the good news is there's this British engineer, John, good enough, is a key inventor of both the nickel based lithium batteries and the art based he did both of them. It's quite an extraordinary story and got a Nobel Prize with others, you know, to get credit for that. So there are dangers last year, but like these batteries are perfectly adequate. They have matured to a level now technology that are absolutely perfectly adequate for what we need. Every year. There's small improvements. Now it but essentially, the the energy density is at a point where it does everything we need.
Dusty Rhodes 11:20
I'm wondering how we can scale this up to engineering size? Because a lot of people you talk to you. I mean, they're dealing with wind generation and water generator power. I mean, that's a lot of power. I mean, is this solution of using old batteries entered to store that power? I mean, what are the problems of making that happen? And how can we get over them?
Eamon Stack 11:38
Yeah, it's like it's part of the solution in terms of gigawatts of power and gigawatts of storage. You're a long way from that. Okay, so that's where possibly hydrogen,
Dusty Rhodes 11:48
is it possible is the first thing? Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Eamon Stack 11:51
But it's a major contribution, because it's going to scale anyway, like, we're going to put 2 million electric cars on our roads. That's, that's in process. And we also have lots of batteries and other applications, and therefore they will be available. It's the key engineering challenge here is to take full advantage of them in a safe way, and make sure we get the maximum value out of these things. Like we could start from a point where the the environmental protection agency might view a second life battery out of car as a hazardous waste. Like that's a problem we need to deal with. Where we need to get to is this is a national asset. And that's where the engineers need to take it away from the EPA and says, Don't Don't, don't don't these really valuable entities for us. And yeah, that's the I think your point and scaling is important. There's a certain limit to it, it might get up to a gigawatt of storage. But we would need more than that the you know, we use 10 gigawatt hours a day or whatever in our lives. We use, we use a lot, but it's significant.
Dusty Rhodes 12:54
And one of the things that I learned in one of our other interviews was with wind stories, they said they can store stuff in batteries. But how long does it stay stored in the battery for? Well, I mean, can you belong to a battery in a long time? Yeah, no,
Eamon Stack 13:10
no, I figured it wouldn't be lost. There'd be 10% loss in the process of putting it in and taking it out. But in terms of storage, no, no, I think it is a battery pack. We've seen them sitting there for a year and very listen to her. So it's great. It's great storage.
Dusty Rhodes 13:25
And what have you heard that about grid scale? battery storage systems? Has anybody tried it?
Eamon Stack 13:30
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There's two systems. One is like the leaders in that are Tesla saying an example. It's fairly in California. So they have these huge mega packs. So they have, you know, 400 megawatts of storage in a center? Right? So that's one What about the storage and it's really successful, because it instantly responds to grid demand. So this is the thing, stability in the grid is as important as the power. And this thing can instantly respond. And they've done the same in in South Australia, where there was this famous project where Tesla said, we'll do it in 100 days, or we give you your money back. And they did it they built a 250 megawatt storage in South Australia. And that solves that grid problem. And they couldn't believe the return on investment was massive. So it's this has been done in quite a few places. So that's one way to do it. Large storage units. I think it was recently one installed in the UK as well. The other thing then is in Tesla has these domestic storage units, they call them Tesla Powerwalls. So they will be 1020 kilowatt hours of storage, but then network them in us in California. And so they have this software called Ultra bitter and and the Automator is bidding for power to buy and sell power. And it has customers 1000s and 1000s of customers who have signed up to this VPP virtual power plant and so whenever the grid needs power instantly that can turn on these domestic units. So you have the large storage units. And then you've got the network small networks are of 1000s of units. And this is live, this is working. This is this is the future. So when we're installing battery storage in a domestic setting or a small business setting, our medium term objective is to network all them together. So that we will be able to trade with the ESB and say, we've got 1050 kilowatt hours of storage. More importantly, we've got power available to you instantly, so that if the grid needs stability, we can provide that both at a micro grid and local grid area and more nationally,
Dusty Rhodes 15:47
you kind of lead me on to another thing that I've heard about this is vehicle to grid V to G. And it's a kind of a smaller version of it, where it's the cars are drawing power, of course, when they're charging up, but then when you plug them in at night, the computer is able to figure out that well, you know, you're not going to use that much power tomorrow or based on your usage or whatever. So it's putting power back into the grid Have I got that right?
Eamon Stack 16:10
That's the same thing. That's the same thing, then as a as a virtual power plant where you are the cars are plugged in. And then you choose you say, Okay, I'm using my car tomorrow for this distance. And so I need this most power, so you can have some of the rest. And sometimes they only have a small bit of power, they just need it available. So currently in the UK, this has been piloted by octopus energy. So it's not far away, where they're actually piloting. And this will become standard, I think, where where cars will be plugged in with less on the US affecting is that a lot of school buses. So they're transitioning school buses to VPPs, whereby they're becoming you know, electric school bus is sitting there out there doing nothing. And there are power source for the grid. So it's a whole new worlds. And it's an exciting new worlds where there's a potential. And the you know, the Holy Grail here is storage, we make tons of power, where can we store it at a price, that makes sense. And so if you have 2 million cars on the road, well, that's a storage bank that is massive. And then if you have all these Second Life, batteries in houses, and whatever you build up. So that's where I think we need to design our future grid. With this in mind, this is now the door has opened for us. And we're in the sense leading the way but by actually doing this.
Dusty Rhodes 17:27
So that's amazing. So instead of energy, going into a car in the form of electricity, batteries, or even petrol, or whatever it happens to be, it becomes a transactional thing. So the car kind of goes well, I'm going to need this, I'm going to run out of whatever storage so I'm going to put this back into the system while I still have it done. It's mind blowing Amon, but
Eamon Stack 17:46
there's something more significant here. So you know, you listen to you know, there's a lot of negativity about electric cars from sources, which are probably the the oil companies themselves, they don't like this change, it's going to cost them a lot of money. However, think about it. They say I'm from carry right carry has 1000s of wind turbines generating power. So at night, there is a tons of energy available at night. So all carry transport could be powered by carry energy. At almost no cost to the system, it's already there. The impetus generating capacity is there, the infrastructure is there. Imagine that transitioning from importing fuel, mostly from Saudi Arabia to power or transport to using our own energy is that a shocking thing in terms of macroeconomics, stop importing stuff that is dirty and polluting, and a problem for us, let's use our own energy to power our own lives. And I tell you, this hasn't happened since 100 years ago, this summer, when I don't know if you know, this guy, Thomas McLaughlin arrived home and in summer holidays from Siemens in Germany, 100 years. And he approached the Irish government and said, My company is interested in building the world's biggest hydroelectric plant in your, in Ireland on the Shannon. And what we're also going to build the first national electric grid. And they did that between 1924 and opened in 1929. mega project, we were energy independent with sustainable energy in 1929. And it was, I just love the visionary stuff of that to say, let's see, let's see what is possible for Ireland. And in that case, they took Ireland which was a small, you know, many, many little micro grids that were very dodgy to transform Ireland and to have 100% power generated from art and a crusher and and to build the first national grid, which of course, we should be very proud of, because it's still an outstanding grid. And that grid today has capacity as wind capacity that we don't use as much as a terror. terawatt hour, enough energy we don't use Every year to power Galway for two years, that's how much energy we don't use. Let's learn harvest that. So we're in terms of the individual households where this has an effect is there is energy at night, as cheap as five cents a unit. And daytime energy is 35 cents a unit. So if I can fill up a battery with five cent electricity at night, my ASP bell goes down fivefold. And this is not imaginary. This is actually the economic reality of today. And as we expand our wind turbine infrastructure, surely in the middle of the night, the price electricity can only go one direction, and lectures to be really cheap. So as a nationalist strategy, this is is absolutely fantastic. And that's the story I want to say to people, we, we really need to stop purchasing, polluting energy sources from Saudi Arabia, they have enough money, they don't need our money when we need to. And it makes next macro economic financial sense and of course domestic financial sense. And it is the pathway to dealing with our co2 emissions, which I'm told we're going to be fined a billion a year from 2030. If we don't resolve this issue. Well,
Dusty Rhodes 21:26
listen. So you've been talking about what we did 100 years ago, here we are today, there is a brilliant solution, the one you're talking about is one of a number of brilliant solutions. And they're all there. Is Ireland actually implementing any of these new technologies. I mean, it should engineers be be thinking about this and starting to get these things into their designs. No,
Eamon Stack 21:45
absolutely. I think lots of engineers are involved in this. The ESB is a bit of a dinosaur, it's difficult to move, they might have done some of this planning 20 years ago, but at least they're doing it now. You know, we're introducing renewables, the national strategy, and I heard a presentation and the engineer Ireland conference last year, you know, on the, you know, the ESP is national strategy. So it is offshore wind would be the primary source of energy, and they're building the motorway to find it may be a civil engineering project. But ultimately, it's going to a port that is going to allow us install a massive capacity of energy in the Atlantic, wherever there's tons of energy. So we're doing this, our best is in terms of when you're generating that energy, one place we can store it is this new resource that we might have missed? We might have seen and that is the you know, like you said, the vehicle to Grid Electric Car storage. But also then the second life of those batteries in other stories, domestic and business energy storage.
Dusty Rhodes 22:48
Yeah. And even though we're talking about cars, this can equally be applied to buildings, you just look as a building as a big car that doesn't go anywhere. That's right. So absolutely. If you think that way, well, the same principles apply, don't they? Yes. So
Eamon Stack 23:01
kind of give you an example here where we've been talking to farmers to dairy farmers, there's 18,000 of them milking at peak time for energy at in the evening. So if you if they can purchase that energy, really cheap in the middle of the night, and use that to power their portrait milking parlor that would save themselves between 10 and 20,000 euros a year. And the batteries are there, we figure for an average dairy farmer about 8080 cows, they would need 80 kilowatt hours of storage. That's it a pollster, battery pack, and we have lots of them. So we were already working with designing a system to go into dairy farms. The scale is 18,000 Farms.
Dusty Rhodes 23:48
When I'm looking at your website, range therapy, I mean, you've got some great pictures that really give an example of what it is that you do. And basically kind of you you convert a trailer that somebody can carry around behind their food van or the car or whatever it happens to be or, or whatever. How can you scale that? Have you scaled that up then so that it's more than just a trailer? Have you actually installed this system into into buildings?
Eamon Stack 24:11
So we know if we the trailer is the mobile version, and then the static versus the range was the house one so we've done 10 houses, we've done houses. And so it's interesting then for people listening to say is compliance is a huge issue here and what has slowed us down. So what we have done over the last few years is we have upgraded at nearly 100 cars with batteries that came out of crashed cars that were bigger than the old batteries in the car. So we swapped out the old small battery for a bigger battery from a crashed car surprised me how many crash car so now we've accumulated all those batteries, but we weren't willing to install them in a domestic setting until all the engineering compliance stuff was resolved. So one of the issues was that if you have a battery pack When something goes wrong, you want the control system to have the ability to turn it off, to intervene before it moves down. Because all engineers would know the ultimate danger of a lithium ion pack is thermal runaway. So if the, if it gets hot, it gets extremely hot and will cause a serious fire. However, once you have the battery management system that monitors that battery pack, it just turns it off before that ever happens. And so for instance, the oldest production electric car is in this leaf. And there has never ever been a thermal issue with a Nissan LEAF in nearly a million units in 1000s of crashes. And that's because the battery management system turned it off before it went down that route. So in terms of putting them into houses, we had to make sure we could do exactly the same thing that we would get the data from the battery management system and our control unit, and then have the capacity to turn the battery off. If there's any deviation from from the key thermo are voltage values. Can you
Dusty Rhodes 26:01
give me a sample of one of the houses that you've installed the system into and just kind of give me an idea of of how it worked and the problems you had to get over and the and then the solutions you came up with and how it's benefited that the house?
Eamon Stack 26:14
Yes, our first installation was in in Cary. And it was a new built house that had a air source heat pump. So it was completely electrical house in it. And it's very passive. So the thing we needed was to make sure that the saw a solar system was installed by a local company and Gilroy energy and carry, and that the inverter they used to invert the AC DC, the DC to AC energy for the solar had to have the capacity for the voltage of the battery pack. So cars generally use 400 volt systems. And therefore the inverter had to be able to handle the battery. So we were able to intervene and say we need this particular inverter, which is an Austrian Fronius inverter that can handle 400 volts in that case. And that was the only intervention, then we went to the house and we had to find the location for the battery pack. So it's kind of 1.6 meters by one meters, 350 kilos, 350 kilos,
Dusty Rhodes 27:15
you're not taking that on a plane.
Eamon Stack 27:18
So so so that looked like they were building a shed with the house. And so we located the battery in the shed. And then with the challenge was to wire the cables from the battery pack into the inverter. So it turned out to be a 40 meter journey, we thought it'd be much shorter. So that was one of the more challenging ones, 40 meters of cables. So you've got the power cables, and then you've got the data and control cables going. And then beside the inverter, we put our control box. So the owner of that house after we went back after a couple of months, and he said to us, he's an accountant, and he said, This is extraordinary. He said, I don't pay for any electricity. I don't pay for any oil or gas because I heat my house with electricity. And I sell electricity back to the grid and get a free pint every day. He said that's a good deal by any accountancy terms.
Dusty Rhodes 28:12
Do you know it's a pity this is an audio podcast because I really want to stand up and applaud you aim. And that's that's just brilliant. And as you say, the challenge now is to kind of take that now from that size. And to adapt it to I'm gonna say skyscrapers just for the for the sake, how can engineers that listening now and kind of gone? This is a really good idea? How can they better educate clients, or even around bosses about the benefits and proper maintenance of battery systems?
Eamon Stack 28:41
Yeah, I think we need one of the factors that limited the deployment of battery electric technology with the cost. And now we've found that we actually already have Irish batteries, we don't manufacture them, but we have lots of them that are very low cost, so that we can overcome that problem. So what you need then is the compliance stuff. So you just need so I have a friend was asking me about it in his house. And then he stopped and said, I have a dental practice that we use a very significant amount of energy during the day. He said, Could you put a battery into my dental practice? And he said, I don't own the building, we rent the building. So I might want to put solar panels up or whatever. But it says can you put a battery in the backyard so that it charges up during the night or whatever? And I said No problem. No, you know, it might be six to eight grand to power the operation, maybe 50 to 80 kilowatt hours of storage. But I said that is actually no problem. In fact, having a Kia Soul battery battery we already have that will be perfect for your child. So that's it it's just a matter of being able to use it now one thing interesting, dusty as well, from an engineering point of view, you might be tempted to break up a battery pack to make it in the format you want or the voltages you want. But actually if you can use The batteries already certified for automotive grades use in there, you have a very high quality certified unit. And so there's a huge advantage of just keeping the battery pack, taking it straight out of the car in its case, and using the battery pack as is. So that's part of a very good strategy. And that's what they do with containers that take the physical battery packs out of the cars and put them on shelves, and then connect them together, that that's the best way to do it. Best strategy. One
Dusty Rhodes 30:28
last question for you, because you said the C word not me. Compliance? Where do we stand with getting the authorities to rubber stamp and approve these things?
Eamon Stack 30:36
Yeah, so so this is well, well down the road here, the EU has looked at this. And in terms of cars, they have done something that was a little surprising, but sensible. When you're now scrapping an electric car, the car has to be split between the traditional carpet and the battery pack. So the battery pack has to go down a different recycling routes. And then at that point, the EU has recognized the second use of batteries is if it's is growing industry, a really important industry. So they've allowed that space. And they have defined then the some of the requirements that are needed. So a automotive battery has a battery management system. And it's got a metric called the state of health. So what they're saying is that the battery has to be better than 50% state of health to be usable in a domestic setting. And then after that it's essentially end of life and ready for recycling. So what what we what we have introduced that in our system is this monitoring system of the state of health of our batteries. And so that's locally available. And it's also now we're building an external server to monitor all our batteries. So that once they approach the end of life, then we will take them out, send them to recycling and then replace them with similar units. So that's what's important that in terms of compliance that we are not alone, are we aware of this, but we actually have systems in place that can deal with batteries that fall below 50% state of health.
Dusty Rhodes 32:07
Somebody is listening today and they want to find out more and dig a little bit deeper from an engineering perspective, where would you suggest they go? Are there any particular websites or books or Yeah, Netflix or right?
Eamon Stack 32:17
Yeah, no, read sarpy.org our sites is probably a good place to go. Again, it's relatively new. So people are just going to have to try engineer Ireland's podcasts that might be an interesting podcast. They're like to see more articles in the journal and so on. So that's it's a new world. And we're beginning to see,
Dusty Rhodes 32:45
I do have to say that and I would recommend it because you're not like a limited company and for profit kind of a thing. You're a social enterprise social enterprise, you have social enterprise, okay. So it's more important, what you're doing as the profit side of it, so to speak. And I found that with the website, which is range therapy.org, where you go, that there's a lot of actual genuine information that you can find out about what Amon is doing. And it's not like it's not a hard sell kind of a website, like sign up here. Blah, blah, blah, whatever. Like, you know, there's a lot of really good information on that. So I definitely recommend the link to Ames website is in the description area of this podcast. So just click on that. And away you go with it. There's an amen. Is there anything else that we'd like to add in? Or any final thoughts you want to share with us today? Yeah,
Eamon Stack 33:31
I think in order to develop winning engineering resources into that we need academic paper to look at it. And we, you know, we need work on the compliance side because those EU regulations haven't yet been implemented and how they're going to be implemented. And we want to make sure that engineers inform how those regulations are implemented, that we don't do something silly and stop ourselves from going down this excellent roofs. So there is also a temptation that there have been recycling plants built that are hungry for batteries. So let's not give into the temptation of giving them our batteries when they have another 20 years of life available to us. So there there's a tension there that we have to live in economic tension where we don't want to be, you know, where you have hungry, new battery recycling systems built, but the supply isn't big enough yet to merit the investment. So the temptation is to give them all the batteries. Don't give away our Irish Batteries, Please, let's use the
Dusty Rhodes 34:27
Listen, yeah, we did it 100 years ago, with hydro electricity we can do it again. If you'd like to find out more about Eamon and some of the topics that we talked about today, we have notes and link details in the description area of the podcast as I said, but for now Eamon Stack, engineer, co founder and director at Range Therapy, thank you so much for being an amazing guest today. Thank you,
Eamon Stack 34:49
Delighted Dusty thank you indeed.
Dusty Rhodes 34:52
If you enjoyed our podcast today, do share with a friend in the business just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland in their podcast player or on YouTube. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland, for previous episodes, more information on engineering across the country or career development opportunities, there are libraries of information on the website at engineersireland.ie. Until next time from myself Dusty Rhodes as always, thank you for listening. Take care