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After an explosion in a 25 MWh battery energy storage system at an EV-charging lot in Beijing which killed two fire fighters, The National Energy Administration in China has placed a temporary ban on using second life batteries in large-scale battery energy storage systems. The ban will be in place for companies that can't demonstrate that they have battery management system meet sufficient safety requirements including balancing and monitoring of the different modules. Already commissioned systems are not affected either than that they should make sure the systems are monitored and evaluated.
In China the State Council has promoted reuse of batteries and several companies have invested large amounts of money in both grading and testing technology as well as highly automated disassembly lines.
The most common second life applications in China are however not large scale energy storage systems but uninterruptable power systems (UPS) in telecom base stations in which as much as 5 GWh of used batteries have been installed. Grid-connected ESS and other large-scale storage solutions have only recently taken off and are still in evaluation stage.
The decision could be seen as a blow to the Chinese reuse industry but with several other channels available we don't believe that this will have any larger effect.