America's growing EV fleet is quietly becoming one of the most valuable energy assets in the country

For much of the 20th century, energy consumption and GDP moved together. U.S. economic growth was driven by heavy manufacturing, physical infrastructure, and the steady expansion of the electrical grid to support it all.

Then, driven by a shift towards a service and tech-based economy, the U.S. began to decouple economic growth from energy consumption. We became more efficient and the need to expand and modernize the electric grid waned.

That decoupling is now reversing. The U.S. economy is experiencing a fundamental re-coupling of energy consumption and GDP growth, driven by AI data centers projected to consume 12% of U.S. electricity by 2028, industrial reshoring, and the broad electrification of transportation and industry.

The bottleneck today is not just generation; it is the speed at which new capacity can reach the grid. Thousands of gigawatts sit stalled in interconnection queues. Building new transmission infrastructure requires permits from federal, state, and local authorities, a process that routinely takes 10 to 15 years from proposal to energization. That timeline is structurally incompatible with the pace of demand growth.

Battery energy storage changes the equation. It fills the gaps that transmission cannot close quickly enough, enabling more localized power availability, and giving the grid the buffer it needs while longer-lead infrastructure catches up.

The harder question is where that storage will come from, and what it will cost. Part of the answer is already on American roads and garages across the country.

An unexpected domestic resource

Over the past decade, more than six million electric vehicles have been sold in the United States. Those vehicles are aging. Their battery packs, many approaching the end of their useful life in a car, are now just beginning their next phase of useful life as energy assets.

Redwood estimates that roughly 1 TWh (1,000 GWh) of EV battery packs will become available in the U.S. through 2040. Beginning in the early 2030s, second-life battery deployment is capable of meeting roughly half of domestic energy storage demand during that period. Redwood's existing collection infrastructure and automotive manufacturer partnerships position us to deploy over 400 GWh of that supply. The U.S. already holds a massive and growing stockpile of domestic battery assets. The question is whether those batteries stay here as American energy infrastructure, powering factories, strengthening the grid, and keeping critical minerals in domestic supply chains, or whether that value leaves the country. At a moment when energy security and supply chain resilience are core national priorities, the answer matters.

Why Redwood is positioned to catch this wave of incoming batteries

Redwood has been building toward this moment since 2017. What began as a battery recycling operation handling mostly manufacturing scrap, was always oriented toward what was coming: the first wave of EV packs from a maturing domestic fleet.

Today, Redwood is the largest battery recycler in North America, processing more than 70% of all domestically recycled batteries through our facilities. That recycling and refining business generates nearly a quarter billion dollars in annual revenue and is expanding into additional critical materials including copper and rare earth minerals. It is the foundation the energy storage business is built on, and that position is not incidental to the opportunity. It is the source of it.

We know when vehicles were built and sold. We know how much people drive. We know the degradation rates of every major pack chemistry on the road. When a pack arrives at Redwood, a diagnostic determines whether it qualifies for redeployment through Redwood Energy. Those that do not qualify go directly into our materials recovery process. Either way, the value is captured- and that dual pathway is a supply chain position no competitor can replicate.

How it works

More than 100 distinct BEV models have been sold in the U.S., each with different pack chemistry, architecture, voltage, and controls software. Integrating that diversity into a unified energy storage system is the central technical challenge of second-life battery deployment.

Redwood's answer is the Pack Manager, our proprietary technology platform that acts as a universal integration layer for any BEV battery pack regardless of manufacturer, voltage, or chemistry. Pack Manager is the core IP that allows Redwood's repurposed battery strategy to scale across the variety of packs available today and those entering the fleet in the years ahead.