On March 31, Guanghua Technology announced that it signed a "strategic cooperation agreement" with Terrestrial Car Rental (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., including the recycling of decommissioned power batteries for new energy vehicles (including ladders and recycling), the comprehensive service plan for the recovery of the mileage of operating vehicles, and the joint construction of a regional comprehensive maintenance service network for new energy vehicle power batteries.
Since August 2021, Guanghua Technology, one of the listed companies for power lithium battery recycling, has signed five framework agreements related to the recycling of waste power batteries.
Industry giants, car companies, battery manufacturers and material factories, many companies have flocked to the new field of power battery recycling to be opened up, especially with the recent price increase in new energy vehicles, more and more exposed the trend of shortage of raw materials, which makes the recovery of precious metals from decommissioned batteries have greater benefits. Moreover, if the batch delivery of new energy vehicles in 2018 is taken as the starting point, the battery retirement of new energy in the next two or three years will usher in an explosive period.
However, the industry doesn't seem ready.
Battery recycling outlets are "useless"
With the entry of players of all sizes, the channel network of battery recycling offline has gradually spread.
According to the ministry of industry and information technology integrated and published on the website of the new energy vehicle power battery recycling service outlets, as of January 11, 2022, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology identified a total of 14899 new energy vehicle power battery recycling service outlets. From the perspective of recycling enterprises, GAC, Geely and FAW are the three enterprises with the largest distribution of power lithium battery recycling service outlets in 2021, with the number of outlets being 1675, 1364 and 993 respectively.
Car companies are the core body of the layout of battery recycling service outlets, they often rely on convenient transportation 4S stores to set up outlets, but the increase in outlets does not seem to bring about the corresponding recycling growth, behind the service outlets data, is still a low-frequency recycling business volume.
Some media surveys of a number of new energy dealers 4S store recycling service outlets found that most of the collection recycling outlets did not set prompt information in the business premises, there is no schematic diagram of the operation process specification, fire safety is also difficult to meet the standard, normal battery recycling business is almost impossible to talk about.
A person in charge of a 4S store said, "The store can recycle the power battery by replacing the old with a new one or buying a second-hand car, but there are very few car owners who come to take the initiative to request battery recycling, and generally only the people who come to see the car occasionally consult two sentences." According to reports, 4S shops sell cars and after-sales is the main business, recycling batteries is only a side business, recycling batteries have not yet seen profit space, most 4S stores are not very concerned about battery recycling.
This is consistent with the current status quo of battery recycling. According to industry sources, only the first batch of 5 companies on the "white list" can handle 600,000 tons, which is more than enough to cope with the current scrap of more than 200,000 tons, but most of these decommissioned batteries have not flowed into recycling outlets.
Because most of the decommissioned power batteries have flowed into small workshops, the batteries recycled by regular outlets only account for about 20% of the entire market.
Car owners sold most of the end-of-life batteries to the "irregular army". It is understood that The beijing recycling company, the quotation for ternary lithium batteries is 15,000 yuan / ton, even if the precious metal content is less, the low value of lithium iron phosphate batteries is as high as 12,000 yuan / ton, while the price of regular enterprises to recover is about 10,000 yuan / ton, or even lower.
At the moment this is an unsolvable problem. Small workshops have low cost inputs to the site, environmental protection, labor, etc., and can give a higher purchase price, and the owner is naturally willing to choose to sell at a high price after comparing the price. The recycling outlets laid out by the regular army or car companies do not have a price advantage, resulting in the difficulty of growing the volume of recycling business, and they are more reluctant to invest more energy.
In the long run, battery recycling will still be "scattered", not to mention standardized and standardized operation.
Swap mode or is it the only way out?
The promotion and popularization of new energy vehicles, the original intention is environmental protection and energy saving, if these decommissioned batteries can not be effectively recycled, the "cleaning" of new energy vehicles is undoubtedly a false proposition.
In order to gather the decommissioned batteries scattered in small workshops into the hands of the regular army with strong technical ability, the feasible way is to improve consumers' environmental awareness and try to guide them to send batteries to regular outlets for recycling; the second is to reduce those small workshops in the recycling industry chain that are not compliant and have greater environmental protection and safety risks, and avoid bad money expelling good money.
However, the former cannot be achieved overnight, and the latter needs to rely more on external forces.
The more core problem is that in order to maximize the value of decommissioned batteries, it is reasonable to make a precise assessment before recycling, understand the battery's factory information, used information, whether there has been a collision, etc., but this information is not so easy to obtain. Generally speaking, car companies are based on technical confidentiality, recycling companies can not read the battery internal information and communication protocols, and if the owner changes in the middle, the relevant information can not be traced.
Batteries belong to individuals, and because power batteries are non-standardized products, recycling is hindered, but once the power exchange mode goes through, these problems seem to be solved.
Power exchange, that is, the car company in the design of the model to leave a replaceable battery space, as long as the vehicle into the replacement station, you can replace the battery within a few minutes, replenish the power. The essence of the power exchange, in fact, is the separation of vehicle electricity, after the separation of vehicle electricity, the battery no longer belongs to the individual, and the subsequent recycling can naturally be completely in the hands of the replacement power station, curbing the chaos of the scrapped battery flowing into the black market from the root cause, and changing the current situation that the regular army is invincible to small workshops.
The battery rental model can also mobilize the enthusiasm of consumers, they only need to pay the price of the car when they buy new energy vehicles, without paying the price of the battery, which can directly reduce the cost of car purchase.
Weilai is the earliest implementation of the power exchange model of the car company, according to a sales staff of Weilai, if you buy a seven-seat version of the ES8, the "beggar version" price is close to 470,000 yuan, if you rent a battery from Weilai, the optional battery pack with a range of 420 kilometers can be 70,000 yuan cheaper, and the optional 580-kilometer battery pack can be 128,000 yuan cheaper. Many consumers who want to buy new energy electric vehicles are willing to choose to rent batteries.
Car companies lead and implement the power exchange model, and there is another advantage, that is, to break the information barriers between car companies and recycling companies. Generally speaking, most car companies are reluctant to open the data to recycling companies, which makes it difficult for recycling companies to obtain relevant information about batteries, but if the recycler and the car company are the same, there is naturally no problem of not being able to obtain effective battery information.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a notice in October last year to organize the pilot of the power exchange model, 11 cities were shortlisted, and a number of passenger car companies laid out the layout of the power exchange and completed the announcement of the power exchange model. The replacement of power stations is already accelerating the layout.
Decommissioned batteries cannot afford to wait
Power swap or charge? This is a choice that participants in new energy vehicles must face, and more and more car companies are choosing the former.
On March 1, Chongqing Xinjing Ascendas Automobile Sales Service Co., Ltd. was established, the business scope includes new energy vehicle sales, new energy vehicle replacement facilities sales, charging pile sales, etc., it is understood that the company is indirectly wholly owned by BYD. In addition, SAIC, Changan, GAC, FAW and other car companies have announced their entry into the power exchange industry in a high-profile manner, and even heavyweight players such as Sinopec have officially entered the power exchange industry.
The rise of the power exchange outlet is undoubtedly the biggest help to explore the optimal path of battery recycling, but it seems that it is farther away than the standardization of battery recycling to solve the power problem of new energy electric vehicles through power exchange.
Tesla has announced that the construction cost of a substation is as high as 500,000 US dollars (about 3.16 million yuan), which does not include the later labor and maintenance costs, land use fees and taxes. BAIC also revealed to the media that the construction cost of a substation is nearly 10 million yuan, and the cost of battery reserves reaches 3.22 million yuan. According to estimates, by 2025, the mainland is expected to reach 22,000 substations, and if calculated at 5 million, the investment of 22,000 substations will reach 110 billion.
High investment does not necessarily translate into profitability. As the largest power exchange operator in China, the current utilization rate of substations in most cities is less than 60%, and Weilai has proposed to build 1100 substations nationwide in 2020, until now, half of this goal has not been achieved.
The key to limiting the popularity and profitability of substation replacement is that there is no unified standard. Battery standards are not uniform, the battery manufacturers cooperating with each electric vehicle are different, and the battery specifications produced are different, which directly leads to the great limitation of vehicles that can provide power exchange services in a replacement power station. That is to say, even if the replacement power station is rolled out on a large scale, a replacement power station may only be able to serve a single vehicle brand or even a single model, which simply cannot solve the problem of insufficient power for new energy vehicles.
Power exchange mode, at present can only be regarded as a good vision of new energy vehicle companies, battery companies and consumers, but want to count on the battery recycling to remove obstacles by changing the power, with the growth of decommissioned batteries, many problems are imminent, may not wait for the popularization of power exchange.
According to data from the China Automotive Power Battery Industry Innovation Alliance, the cumulative total number of decommissioning of power batteries in mainland China in 2020 will be about 200,000 tons (about 25GWh), and this number will rise to 780,000 tons by 2025. If 80% of the decommissioned batteries flow into the black market, it means that these power batteries cannot be effectively recycled, which will cause great environmental harm.
In fact, even if the power exchange model works, it will not help the current decommissioned batteries to be effectively recycled, because this part of the new energy vehicles sold around 2016 has not been designed to be able to replace the power. In addition, not all car companies have laid their own substations, more is to choose to cooperate with operators such as Aodong, Aodong to intervene in car development, in order to help car companies place battery packs, to achieve adaptation, and a model of replacement transformation depending on the complexity of the need for 6-8 months to 1 year.
Spending such a long time to renovate, car companies are not willing to let all vehicles wait.
The big pie of new energy vehicles, from the upstream to the downstream and even the automotive after-sales service market, every link in the industrial chain seems to be full of attractive interests, but in the early stage of barbaric growth and no rules, everything is full of risks.
The Tao is always reasonable, and has used the name Crooked Dao, the Internet and the new media in the science and technology circle. The WeChat public account of the same name: Dao always has a reason (daotmt). This article is an original article, and any form of reproduction without retaining the author's relevant information is not retained.