I had an interesting conversation about how used electric vehicle batteries can be repurposed to for grid-scale energy storage with Moment Energy CEO Edward Chiang last week at WebSummit Vancouver 2026. It’s an important issue: Reusing batteries, of course, is MUCH cleaner and more efficient than recycling them. You can watch the whole interview, or check out excerpts below.
EXCERPTS (edited for clarity):
VINCE: So, Edward, why don’t you start off by explaining what Moment does, what the whole concept of a “second life for batteries” is, and how it fits into the energy transition.
EDDIE: Yeah, absolutely. Our goal is to make sure that we’re solving two major problems. One is we want to make sure that these (used) batteries don’t end up in landfills. And then: how do we actually fix this broken grid that’s over a hundred years old?
Both of those didn’t really have an elegant solution up until our thesis of: why don’t we actually not landfill these batteries, but instead repurpose them into stationary storage for another 10, 15, 20 extra years of life before we finally recycle them? (Moment’s repurposed EV battery systems now help provide power at the Vancouver airport as well as a hospital and several businesses.)
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VINCE: What you do often gets lumped in with recycling. It’s taking something and making a second use of it, but really it’s sort of upstream of recycling, right? Explain that a little bit.
EDDIE: Unfortunately, what has happened is we threw billions of dollars into battery recycling, but we still haven’t figured out the technology to make (EV battery) recycling as profitable as lead acid battery recycling is today.
So we’re still trying to figure that out, and we hope that in the next 10, 15, 20 years battery recycling — where you grind up these batteries into black mass — is profitable. But while we figure that out, why don’t we repurpose them for extra years?
If you come to our facility you’ll see these modules. They’re like Lego blocks. We just have to test them, ensure that they’re nice and safe for the second-life application, and then we’ll Lego-block them together into this beautiful container and deploy it to power buildings.
VINCE: I think this is a really important idea that gets short shrift: Repurposing something, reusing the thing for its original purpose. It’s always more energy efficient. And it’s usually cheaper.
I always use the example of milk bottles. When my mom was young, everybody would get their milk delivered in bottles, and then they’d return those bottles to the milkman. You can take that bottle and crush it down, grind it down, melt it, and turn it into a new bottle, with emissions and energy use all along the way. Or you can just wash it out and fill it up again with milk. And that’s basically the concept behind what you guys are doing.
EDDIE: Yeah, absolutely. We gathered a lot of interest in the early days, especially out in Asian countries like Japan and India, mainly because waste is something that is not acceptable. Unfortunately, we’re really used to just using something a little bit and then throwing it away.
I’m really happy that over the past two years we’ve culturally taken a new turn on repurposing before recycling, trying to use as much of a material or mineral as possible. Mainly because now the narrative has turned from sustainability and energy into a national security issue. Especially in the United States, a lot of Americans have realized 90 percent of the world’s batteries are from China. And unfortunately, if we were to go through an adversarial event, is it really that great of an idea to rely on only one country? That’s why they’ve really been trying to onshore battery manufacturing. Our current Canadian government is also trying to onshore a lot of manufacturing as well.
VINCE: I don’t really think there’s been so much of a shift around recycling. I know there’s been quite a lot of talk about it, but actually the industry is still pretty small. It’s much smaller than the recycling industry in China. Under the Biden administration, they were giving all kinds of money for metal recycling, for stuff like you guys do. Under Trump, a lot of that’s been scrapped, pulled back. That funding is gone.
You guys also have a lot of competition in your space, right? There’s other startups. There’s an outfit called BTU Energy that I talked to in California. And then Redwood Materials, which is probably the biggest battery recycler in North America, founded by one of the guys who co-founded Tesla. They’re getting into exactly the same game as you guys.
What about AI data centers? Everybody’s talking about huge energy demand — where are we going to come up with all this energy? Can you guys really help with that?
EDDIE: Actually we work with most of the hyperscalers at this point asking us for batteries. One issue is that the current Trump administration doesn’t allow them to buy batteries from China, so they’re trying to find domestic sources. The problem is even if you build battery cells in America or Canada, where do you source the lithium and cobalt? You still source it from China. They select us because these vehicles are already driving on domestic roads and allied roads today.
Right now AI data centers are pulling huge amounts of electricity. Nobody can afford their energy bills doubling or tripling. Affordability across North America, and really across the world, has been declining. So it makes a lot of sense that people are not very excited about data centers in their backyard. Which is really where batteries help.
You can charge batteries at 3:00 a.m. when everybody’s asleep and power is really cheap. Then you can discharge during peak times so that you can fully decouple that data center from the grid and decouple it from the neighborhood and increasing prices from there.
VINCE: All right, that’s a great optimistic note to end on.
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