GoKawiilIn Brief
Waymo has announced a deal with an energy storage company called B2U to use retired robotaxi batteries to serve electricity grids in California and Texas.
The deal helps answer the question of how Waymo is thinking about the end-of-life treatment of the thousands of robotaxis it has deployed around the United States. Almost all of those are currently Jaguar I-Pace EVs, though the company has recently started deploying a limited number of vans built by Chinese automaker Zeekr.
Waymo said the partnership will involve the deployment of “hundreds of megawatts of storage capacity” but did not offer any further specifics.
B2U is one of numerous companies focusing on battery repurposing rather than recycling. Redwood Materials, founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel and backed in part by Waymo’s parent company Alphabet, recently spun up its own second-life storage business using old EV batteries.