Moment Energy, an electric vehicle (EV) battery repurposing company based in the province of British Columbia, Canada, has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to receive a $20.3 million award to establish the first UL1974 Certified manufacturing facility in the United States dedicated to (you guessed it) repurposing EV batteries.
The company, which participated in this year’s DISTRIBUTECH International Startup Spotlight, will deploy the funding on a state-of-the-art Gigafactory in Taylor, Texas to produce safe, reliable, and affordable battery energy storage systems from repurposed EV batteries.
Work will begin in the first quarter of next year to prepare for the design and development of the facility, which will have an annual production capacity of 1 gigawatt-hour (GWh) once fully operational. Edward Chiang, CEO of Moment Energy, told Texas television station KXAN he’d eventually like to scale to 2 GWh. The plant will create 50+ manufacturing jobs and 200 new positions and is expected to open sometime in 2026.
“We are honored to be selected for this transformative initiative,” said Chiang. “Our mission to provide worldwide access to clean, affordable, and reliable power aligns perfectly with the DOE’s goals, and this facility will be instrumental in our commitment to enable all retired EV batteries to be repurposed by 2030.”
Moment’s award is part of a $428M tranche of funding announced by the Biden-Harris Administration earlier this week to accelerate domestic clean energy manufacturing in former coal communities. The program aims to address critical energy supply chain vulnerabilities while creating jobs and revitalizing communities. Moment Energy’s project will also contribute to the Justice40 Initiative, spurring economic revitalization in Taylor, TX, and surrounding disadvantaged communities.
Moment Energy is North America’s first and only company to achieve UL 1974 certification for repurposing EV batteries, a standard for assessing the condition, safety, and energy capacity of batteries before they can be repurposed for other uses, such as stationary energy storage. The company has worked with major automotive companies including Mercedes Benz Energy to support circular economy goals.
Moment Energy also claims to have developed one of the world’s most advanced second-life battery repurposing facilities and datasets, which will soon be leveraged by an in-the-works proprietary AI management system that will enable all battery energy storage to become safer and longer lasting. Last winter, the company announced its first ever end-to-end integration involving Hydro Ottawa Limited, an electricity distribution company, and BluWave-ai, a Canadian provider of artificial intelligence (AI) enabled grid energy optimization platform to bring distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) capability to the distribution grid. Moment Energy aims to help utilities, microgrids, and commercial customers improve grid reliability, power EV charging stations, and reduce demand charges.
The Biden administration has stressed the need to build out domestic EV battery recycling capacity to achieve material supply chain resilience and meet the country’s clean energy goals. According to recent commentary from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia, U.S. EV battery recycling plants plan to have the capacity to recycle 1.3 million EV-equivalent batteries annually, but only 341,000 will be available by 2030, which may pose problems for keeping those facilities profitable.
