Ensembles of Context and Form for Repurposing Electric Vehicle Batteries: An Exploratory Study

Beverungen Daniel, Bräuer Sebastian, Plenter Florian, Klör Benjamin, Monhof Markus

Zusammenfassung

The electric vehicle battery is the crucial component in electric vehicles. It forms a complex good that propels the vehicle's engine and causes around 25% of the vehicle's overall costs. Unfortunately, due to deterioration, the battery's use gradually restricts a vehicle's driving range, acceleration, and charging speed over time. Consequently, after about eight to ten years of operation or at least about 120,000 kilometers driven, automobile manufacturers recommend a battery replacement. Despite its deterioration, the battery might still be repurposed to serve as a battery energy storage system in less demanding second-life application scenarios. Examples are home energy storage solutions for storing energy from photovoltaic panels or larger buffer storage solutions for stabilizing energy from wind parks or solar farms. With strongly increasing numbers of electric vehicles world-wide, some hundred thousand aged batteries can be assumed to be available per year in the 2020s. Additionally, considering the necessity for a reliable matching of individually aged batteries and second-life application scenarios, the decision for which scenario a battery should be repurposed needs to be supported by information systems. However, since current research falls short of identifying and prioritizing the requirements that characterize second-life application scenarios, information system developers lack justificatory knowledge to guide and constrain the design of corresponding information systems. In an explorative multi-method study, we set out to identify the requirement categories and metrics that need to be elicited for repurposing batteries. We triangulate evidence from a Delphi Study involving 20 battery experts with field data on the EfficiencyHouse Plus, a revelatory proof-of-concept project on repurposing and further using batteries as battery energy storage system in a smart home context. The study (a) contributes a prioritized list of requirement categories and metrics for repurposing batteries, and (b) documents how they were instantiated respectively why they were important in the analyzed case. These essential empirical insights inform the design and evaluation of innovative IT artifacts in the field of Green IS research.