Redwood Energy: Fast, low-cost storage to power the age of AI and a changing grid

At Redwood, we’ve built a battery supply chain to recover end-of-life batteries and recycle their critical minerals, keeping them in circulation and driving the energy transition. Today, we receive over 20 GWh of batteries annually—the equivalent of 250,000 EVs—representing about 90% of all lithium-ion batteries and battery materials recycled in North America.   

Through our nationwide logistics network, sorting, and recycling infrastructure, we manage EV battery packs safely and efficiently. And as more batteries reach end-of-life, we’re discovering that many still retain more than 50% of their usable capacity—enough to be put back to work before recycling. 

Redwood Energy is our solution: a platform to repurpose these battery packs into low-cost, large-scale energy storage systems that fill a critical gap in today’s power landscape, while maximizing their value between recovery and recycling. 

Low-cost storage couldn’t arrive at a more important time. Electricity demand is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. AI and the rapid electrification of nearly every sector—from transportation to industry—are driving a massive need for more energy. By 2028, data centers alone could consume 12% of U.S. electricity. Traditional grid expansion can’t keep up. Renewables are intermittent. And imported, new energy storage is still too expensive to address the entire problem.  

Redwood offers a lower-cost solution: repurposing used battery packs—with most of their capacity remaining—into modular energy storage systems that bridge today’s infrastructure gaps with speed and scale.  

Redwood Energy 

Battery energy storage is a commodity on the grid—it doesn’t matter how you store a kilowatt-hour, only that it’s reliable and cost-effective. Redwood saw a clear opportunity to reduce energy storage costs by repurposing depreciated but functional EV battery packs before recycling.  

Rather than building new storage systems, we extend the value of existing ones—improving material utilization, lowering costs, and bridging the gap between recovery and recycling. Redwood Energy technology allows EV batteries that no longer meet vehicle demands to perform well in stationary storage, with slower discharge and partial capacity. Redwood Energy systems cost substantially less than new lithium-ion storage projects. 

This is not a niche opportunity; it’s a growing, scalable energy resource. More than 100,000 EVs will come off U.S. roads this year alone. Today, over 5 million EVs are active on U.S. roads, representing an estimated 350 GWh of energy that will reach end-of-life in the coming years. And with another 150 GWh entering the operational fleet annually, that total is increasing fast and could supply 50% or more of the entire energy storage market.  

How it works: 

1. Collection & storage: Our national logistics network recovers more than 70% of battery packs from across North America, which are safely stored and prepared for testing. 

2. Advanced diagnostics: Every battery is evaluated through Redwood’s in-house platform to determine suitability for reuse versus recycling. 

3. Reused battery integration: Qualified packs are integrated, regardless of OEM or chemistry, into flexible, modular storage systems using our proprietary control architecture. 

4. Flexible energy storage: Redwood’s systems can operate independently or be connected to the grid—shaving peak loads, increasing resilience, and storing energy from intermittent sources like solar or wind to support high-demand applications such as data centers. 

5. End-of-life recycling: When the battery truly reaches the end of its useful life, it flows seamlessly into Redwood’s existing recycling system for critical mineral recovery. 

Redwood is uniquely positioned to bring this solution to market, at scale. We have unmatched access to feedstock, of which EV packs are the fastest growing input, the engineering expertise to integrate battery packs from any manufacturer and of any chemistry quickly and reliably and can unlock additional value through recycling at true end-of-life. This full-stack approach allows us to build a system that offers customers a fast, capital-efficient path to scale.  

Redwood x Crusoe modular microgrid 

We’ve already built a 12 MW and 63 MWh capacity microgrid, which is the largest second-life battery deployment in the world and the largest microgrid in North America. It’s powering a modular data center for AI infrastructure company Crusoe—best known for its large-scale data center campus in Abilene, Texas, the initial site of the Stargate project—at an energy cost lower than the grid. The system demonstrates exactly what Redwood Energy is designed to do: bring resilient, low-cost power to market, fast. 

What sets us apart 

This is just the beginning for Redwood Energy. We have over a gigawatt-hour of reusable batteries in our deployment pipeline, and that’s expanding by an additional 5 GWh in the coming year. We’re already designing 100+ MW projects—10X the size of this deployment. Redwood Energy will play a critical role in meeting the power demands of the AI era while accelerating American innovation across industries. 

With access to most of the reusable batteries in North America, advanced diagnostics, and full vertical integration from collection to recycling, Redwood can offer a faster and more cost-effective solution—powered by what we already have.