The Redwood energy ecosystem is designed to deliver power to manufacturers faster than waiting on the grid
(Image courtesy of Redwood Materials)
Redwood Materials has set out how its energy ecosystem links battery recovery, second-life storage and in-house power electronics into a faster route to power for manufacturers facing long waits for grid capacity. Co-founder and CEO JB Straubel points to the Rivian partnership as the working example, with Redwood collecting Rivian’s end-of-life packs for either second-life storage or recycling, and a 10 MWh storage system at Rivian’s Normal, Illinois plant.
Inside the Redwood energy ecosystem at Rivian
Redwood collects Rivian EV battery packs through Rivian’s nationwide network of service centres once they are no longer suitable for the vehicle, then evaluates each one to decide between repurposing it for storage, at Rivian’s manufacturing facilities or elsewhere, and recycling it. The Normal, Illinois plant is the site of a 10 MWh second-life system that the companies describe as the first repurposed-battery storage system at a US automotive manufacturer’s facility, using more than 100 Rivian packs under Redwood Pack Manager technology to reduce cost and grid load during peak demand. An October 2026 expansion also brings scrap from Rivian’s manufacturing operations into Redwood’s recycling.
How recovered packs shape the Redwood energy ecosystem
Straubel presents recycling and storage as two workstreams that build on each other rather than as separate wins. What Redwood learns from returning packs about degradation across chemistries, vintages and use cases informs the DC-DC converters it designs and builds in-house, which are designed to turn a mixed set of packs into a single power system. Rivian and Redwood say retired EV batteries often still have substantial useful energy capacity for second-life applications. Because the partnership gives Redwood a direct supply of retired packs, its Rivian storage systems do not depend on newly manufactured cells, and Redwood describes its architecture as chemistry agnostic and able to work with almost any power source.
Speed to power for data centres and heavy industry
The Redwood energy ecosystem targets a timing problem, since new grid connections can take years and inverters, transformers and switchgear face the same supply chain bottlenecks as the rest of the buildout. Straubel sees the same speed-to-power need in an automaker powering a plant and a compute provider bringing a data centre online. At Redwood’s Sparks, Nevada campus, a 12 MW and 63 MWh microgrid built in just under four months for Crusoe had delivered 99.2% operational availability over seven months of continuous operation as of March 2026, when the companies announced an expansion from four to 24 Crusoe Spark modular data centres, nearly seven times the original compute capacity.
Redwood plans to pair its battery systems with solar and other generation sources in large-scale power generation and delivery projects that its own teams engineer end to end. Straubel describes the Redwood energy ecosystem, spanning materials, batteries and power, as the foundation for microgrids sized for AI data centres, hyperscalers and heavy industry.
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