Jaguar Land Rover is partnering with Pramac to develop portable energy storage units, powered partly by second-hand Jaguar I-Pace batteries that once powered EVs.
Pramac is a company that specialises in energy solutions — batteries, both residential and portable, make up most of what the company deals with.
Which makes Pramac a decent candidate for handling Jaguar’s second-life I-Pace batteries. These are the batteries that Jaguar puts in its I-Pace range of cars, however no Land Rover vehicles currently use these same batteries.
As per this announcement, these batteries are sourced from vehicles that have used them for some time, in particular test and prototype vehicles. They’re removed and put to work in Pramac’s new portable batteries, which can be charged using solar panels.
Pramac calls it the Off-Grid Battery Energy Storage System (ESS), which sources lithium-ion cells from said I-Pace batteries. The intention is to provide zero-emissions power when mains supply is limited and unavailable.
Perhaps one of the more notable things about this announcement is that it’s the first of its kind from Jaguar Land Rover. With the company intending to produce net-zero carbon by 2039, it wants to launch programs that deliver second life to existing electric vehicle batteries.
“This announcement is a great example of how we will collaborate with industry leaders to deliver our sustainable future and achieve a truly circular economy,” said Andrew Whitworth, battery manager of the circular economy team at Jaguar Land Rover.
It’s hard to not get behind this — lithium-ion battery production typically requires the introduction of new materials, which require mining and, overall, the use of a finite resource. If we’re recycling a finite resource as best as we can, we’ll be doing a much better job in terms of sustainability. This is a major argument for converting your car to an EV. Additionally, last year Whichcar did a really interesting article on interesting places used EV batteries have been put to work.
“The transition to an electric future, with Jaguar becoming all-electric from 2025 and the first all-electric Land Rover model expected in 2024, is integral to our sustainability strategy through the development of a comprehensive EV ecosystem from batteries to charging. This includes our effort to enable technical and business innovations for battery reuse for second-life applications,” added François Dossa, executive director for strategy and sustainability at Jaguar Land Rover.
Pramac says that the system it has developed directly reuses up to 85% of the vehicle battery supplied by Jaguar Land Rover. Moreover, it has a capacity of up to 125kWh.
For comparison, the largest battery option for the Tesla Model S is 100kWh. Apparently it’s powerful enough to keep the power on in a regular family home for a week. The units are set to be available for commercial hire and are fitted with Type 2 EV connectors.
The Jaguar-Pramac battery has already seen some practical use, deployed during testing for the upcoming 2022 Formula E World Championship. Here, it was used to power diagnostics equipment and analyse the track performance of the Jaguar Formula E racer. It also supplied auxiliary power to the pit garage.
Jaguar Land Rover is also set to deploy an off-grid battery ESS at the Land Rover Experience Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa.
It’ll be exciting to see where Jaguar Land Rover go with this — putting used batteries to use in other applications is a pretty great idea that we should see more of as we switch from fossil fuels to renewables.