Second Spark - recycled batteries for rural electrification

Decades of war and economic isolation have left Myanmar with one of the least-developed national grids in Asia. Distributed mini-grids and solar home systems are playing a growing role in electrifying rural areas, however, they remain expensive. In addition, the reliance on lead-acid batteries result in poor performance, high maintenance and short operating lives. 

By 2030 there will be more than 1,000GWh of retired li-ion batteries from EVs.

Second Spark introduces reliable, affordable lithium-ion batteries into Myanmar creating a value chain for the sourcing, assembly and manufacture of recycled battery stacks at the village level.

By developing both a product and the value chain for community involvement, Second Spark aims to benefit 17 million people in rural Myanmar by electrifying their homes & businesses and catalysing  new community enterprises. In the long-term success in Myanmar is scalable to more than 1.2 billion people globally currently without electricity access.

Distributed energy solutions have been instrumental in electrifying rural Myanmar, however, they suffer from two critical problems that affect performance and slow their roll-out:

1) Affordability: without the subsidies afforded to grid extension, mini-grids and SHSs remain the most expensive electrification solutions in Myanmar, meaning that those last mile communities who need them most are saddled with the highest prices - with stationary storage comprising a significant share of CAPEX.

2) Reliability: Many mini-grids and SHS rely on stationary storage to ensure electricity is available when communities demand it. The vast majority rely on lead-acid battery technology which perform poorly – they have low energy densities, complex maintenance requirements and operating lives of less than 2 years.

In addition, by 2030 there will be more than 1,000 GWh of accumulated storage retired from Electric Vehicles with no proven value streams for second life applications – half of this capacity will be in Myanmar’s northern neighbour China

Second Sparks considers the problems facing reliable, affordable stationary storage for Myanmar's mini-grid sector, and the growing e-waste problem from the rapid deployment of EVs in Asia as conjoint challenges best addressed by a circular economy solution lead at the village level.

Second Spark targets rural communities of Myanmar who live more than 6km away from the existing national grid - approximately 17.5million people. These communities are predominately agrarian and are also strongly correlated with poverty and ethnicity.

Myanmar is home to one dominant ethnicity - the Bahma - and 153 ethnic minority groups. The national grid is concentrated in the densely populated lowlands occupied by the Bahma while electrification of ethnic minority groups in the highlands has been slow or non-existent. 

Distributed energy solutions are democratic as they centre ownership, management and control of mini-grids in the communities using the systems. For rural Myanmar where self-rule is a political flash point, this is important.

Second spark adopts a community-led approach to the production of recycled stationary storage batteries. Working through local associations we will identify village entrepreneurs who will be trained to develop businesses that service the value chain from recycled batteries it finished units.

Communities will benefit from cheaper, more reliable mini-grids and Solar Home Systems, while local entrepreneurs will trap other economic and employment benefits from Second Spark within poor, ethnic communities of Myanmar's uplands.

Second Spark introduces high performance, affordable lithium-ion batteries into Myanmar’s mini-grid market, by prototyping the technology and creating a value-chain for the assembly and manufacture of recycled battery stacks at the village level. Second Spark is both a product and business model for community development.

Product: We will use our bespoke Battery Management System (BMS), and our expertise in e-waste recycling to produce, modular, transportable stationary storage battery stacks for household (<10kWh) and village (<100kWh) distributed systems. Initially the battery stacks will rely on '18650' format lithium-ion cells recovered from computer waste, in the future larger products derived from EV waste-streams will also be developed .

Assembly business model: We will use our experience in community development to build capacity and establish a local manufacturing value chain that creates economic value for villages at each step of the production process from sourcing and sroting e-waste to the assembly, testing and packaging of recycled battery stacks.

The product will benefit some 17 million people currently without electricity and more than 6km from the national grid.

The business model will also bring additional benefit to enterprise champions in target villages who are supported to establish and run successful businesses that bring employment and prosperity to rural Myanmar.

Second Spark is a partnership between three Australian companies:

AMPERES is a company, focussed on catalysing integrated, sustainable end equitable solutions to the entrenched development problems of the Greater Mekong region. We have more than a dozen years experience working in mainland Southeast Asia, including the development of solar-storage mini-grids for commercial and industrial clients and for village electrification. Together with our parent company Unlimited Energy Australia we have won or been finalists in eight international renewable energy awards since 2012, including winning the 2019 Alliance for Rural Electrification Award for Private Sector Project in a developing country 2018 Intersolar Smarter-E award for pioneering a hybrid li-ion/aqueous ion hybrid mini-grid,; and 2017 Finalist

Switch Batteries started by developing technology for electric racing motorcycles. In 2014 and 2015 our bikes won back-to-back Australia Electric Superbike Championships, utilising our bespoke 700v battery. In 2018, we developed a cloud monitoring battery management system (BMS) and a 48v, modular, swappable battery for stationary storage applications.

Total Green Recycling: is Western Australia’s largest e-waste recycling company, responsible for handling 90% of the state’s waste-stream. The company keeps more than 2,356t of e-waste from entering land-fill in WA. 

The project incorporates two main innovations:

• an innovative application of e-waste material to provide a higher performance battery at an affordable price point, and
• an innovative approach to the manufacture of the units to lock a greater proportion of value and benefits within rural communities who need it most.

The innovation is the development and publication of an open standard battery module, incorporating an open source battery management system, enclosure and connectors (data and power) to enable an ecosystem of end use applications.

It is expected that the proposed Open Source battery will:

• Encourage collaboration, competition and compatibility, each of which will contribute to driving down the cost and risk of deploying this technology into a new region.
• Allow the curation of design effort from a global community.
• Enable a distributed manufacturing model where low-income countries participate in the development of a product that is of increasing global demand.
• Potentially become a ubiquitous commodity, powering developing and developed world products alike. 

At present remote, rural households have limited options or choice for stationary storage. Solar Home Systems, currently experiencing a boom in Myanmar, rely almost exclusively on lead-acid batteries to store day-light PV generation for use in preparation of the evening meal. However,  these batteries, while ‘state-of-the-industry’ suffer from serious issues:

• Poor performance: lead acid batteries have low C factors, poor discharge capacity and typically struggle with high load requirements such as e-cooking.
• Poor lifetime: for many countries in southeast asia lead-acid batteries need replacement within 18 months of installation saddling poor households with an on-going, significant debt burden.
• High maintenance costs: lead-acid batteries also require maintenance which can be a challenge for rural households and compound longevity issues.
• Environmental and health risk: safe storage of lead-acids can be an issue.

The focus of Second Spark is the development of a locally manufactured, standardised and shareable Open Source battery built from recycled e-waste streams. More specifically,  standardisation and consolidation of methods developed by a global community focussed on building ‘DIY Powerwalls’ from ‘18650’ format lithium-ion cells recovered from e-waste. Second Spark will demonstrate that lithium ion cells in a typical urban e-waste stream are suitable feedstock for a scalable and sustainable distributed energy systems.

The project involves the development of a low cost energy module built with recycled laptop batteries.

Second Spark will succeed where other lithium-ion batteries have failed for three main reasons:

1 - we prioritise value-add at the community level to profit at the company level. Second Spark technology will be completely open-source allowing communities to overcome the technological barriers that inhibit village enterprises from providing home-grown solutions to village electrification issues.

2 - we start with a raw product (e-waste) that is significantly cheaper than new lithium ion products cutting the cost of batteries 

3 - we emphasise local manufacturing using local labor which is not only good for local employment, but also cuts 25-50% of the cost of lithium ion batteries making them more competitive than all other products on the market.

Currently: none

In one year: five villages (1500 households)

In five years: 10% of the 17.5million people who are unelectrified and more than 6km from the national grid.

The high level strategy for Second Sparks is to demonstrate sufficient field success that a project of the Amperes-Switch-TGR partnership can be converted into a stand-alone business attracting sufficient investment to scale out the solution from a few villages (year 1-2), to a sizeable share of the off-grid, unelectrified sector of Myanmar.

1) financing is the main barrier for Second Sparks 

2) safety is the main technical barrier for the production of recycled lithium ion batteries. 

3) local waste streams represents the major logistical barrier for Second Sparks as the business model is build around the local and local communities will have limited capacity to source e-waste from distant upstream sources.

1) Financing - Second Spark aims to overcome this barrier by incorporating the project as a company and seeking investment from a number of sources: equity from impact-investment funds, and debit and blended finance from international finance institutions.

2) Safety. Second Sparks will utilise its affiliation with the Australian Future Batteries Cooperative Research Centre to introduce state-of-the-art testing instrumentation and processes into the assembly process.

3) local waste streams: Second Spark will work on behalf of local communities to establish partnerships with myanmar and chinese companies producing e-waste to secure a steady feed stream for battery production.

Currently, Second Sparks is a joint-initiative between three Australia companies, Amperes, Switch Batteries and Total Green Recycling.

Second Sparks operates as a stand alone project governed by an MOU for collaboration between the three entities.

4 people work on the Second Sparks solution.

The team behind Second Spark are best placed to deliver our solution, because the partnership between the three organisations was specifically designed to pool disparate skills needed for success from three very different organisations:

AMPERES is a company, focussed on catalysing integrated, sustainable end equitable solutions to the entrenched development problems of the Greater Mekong region. We have more than a dozen years experience working in mainland Southeast Asia, including the development of solar-storage mini-grids for commercial and industrial clients and for village electrification. Together with our parent company Unlimited Energy Australia we have won or been finalists in eight international renewable energy awards since 2012, including winning the 2019 Alliance for Rural Electrification Award for Private Sector Project in a developing country 2018 Intersolar Smarter-E award for pioneering a hybrid li-ion/aqueous ion hybrid mini-grid,; and 2017 Finalist

Switch Batteries started by developing technology for electric racing motorcycles. In 2014 and 2015 our electric motorcycles won back-to-back Australia Electric Superbike Championships, utilising our bespoke 700v battery. In 2017 Switch began development of stationary storage applications for its EV technology. In 2018, we developed a cloud monitoring battery management system (BMS) and a 48v, modular, swappable battery.

Total Green Recycling: is Western Australia’s largest e-waste recycling company, responsible for handling 90% of the state’s waste-stream. The company was established small in 2008 and now employs 30 people keeping more than 2,356tonnes of e-waste from entering land-fill in WA. TGR has also designed and built Australia’s first semi-automated recycling plant.

In addition to the three organisations that are governing partners for Second Spark, we also partner with the following entites:

1) community associations - we work closely with a number of industry and community associations in Myanmar that are advocating and deploying renewable mini-grids in rural areas. These include the Renewable Energy Association of Myanmar, HPNET, and Hydropower for Community Empowerment.

2) university partners - Switch Batteries is a member of the Australian Future Batteries Collaborative Research Centre - a network of dozens of academic and private sector partners working with battery technology in Australia.

Second Sparks adopts the entrepreneur support business model, which sees the team providing business technical support and financial services to a target group of village entrepeneurs who will then manufacture recycled battery stacks for sale to the mini-grid sector and ultimately pay Second Sparks for services and support.

In the short and medium term significant capital will be needed to finance the establishment of village-level assembly enterprises, and our strategy is to rely on impact-investment and blended finance from IFIs for this.

over time assembly entrepreneurs will pay back concession loans which we provided for the establishment of their enterprises and other support provided which will provide an income stream for Second Spark.

Second Spark emerged as an initiative by the Amperes-Switch-TGR partnership as a specific response to an identified need. This was based on many years working in the deployment of mini-grids and an awareness of the specific challenges that their roll-out  in Myanmar is facing.

In addition to financing, what we most seek from SOLVE is mentorship and connections to help us commercialise a project into a viable social enterprise that is self-sustaining and capable of living up to its mandate to empower communities to build their own renewable energy mini-grids for safe, reliable and affordable electricity.

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Second Sparks would use the GM prize for two core activities:

1) we would secure the necessary partnerships and supply chain for recycled e-waste at scale, in Myanmar. 

2) we would invest the prize as seed financing for the establishment of 1-2 community enterprises that would serve as pilots for the business model.

Our objective is to create an industry in Myanmar, where people develop the local skills to receive, process and operate batteries. It is expected that some people will specialise in making batteries and supplying them to their locality and surrounds. Some will specialise in developing uses for these batteries in ways that replace manual, combustion fueled and animal labour. In addition, nature of the battery assembly task is such that neither gender has a natural advantage, and if the cottage-factory is located within the village it has the potential to support women supplement daily unpaid labour activities with wage-earning work in the assembly of the units.

Second Spark will use the Innovation for Women's prize to target women as the village-entrepeneurs whom we support in establishing the assembly-line businesses.