The Global LEAP Awards Solar E-Waste Challenge is an international competition to identify and promote innovations in solar e-waste management across sub-Saharan Africa. In February 2020, the competition announced four winning companies to implement innovative projects in off-grid battery technologies across five countries. As these projects draw to a close, this blog series explores their accomplishments to date and insights into each company’s unique challenges and lessons learned.
Data shows that batteries are the weakest link in off-grid solar products — often disposed of when as much as 90% of their original capacity is still available. At the start of the Solar E-Waste Challenge in 2020, M-KOPA addressed this battery gap through an improved Battery Management System (BMS) for better data analytics. Their project focused on increasing battery analytics and improving the state of health data to inform second life opportunities and repurposing.
Solar-Powered Electric Motorbikes: A New Solar E-Waste Problem or Opportunity?
M-KOPA is a connected asset financing platform that offers products like solar home systems and financial services. Since 2010, M-KOPA has grown their team to over 1,500 employees with over 1.5 million customers across five global offices. The Solar E-Waste Challenge offered the company an opportunity to invest in research and development for improved battery performance for a variety of solar products — but focused specifically on batteries for e-mobility.
Over the course of the Challenge, M-KOPA tested batteries in their customers’ homes using smart chips. The smart chips provided real-time data to better predict when the battery might fail and which cells could be replaced or repurposed. The M-KOPA team also worked with component manufacturers and laboratories to design and test the quality and performance specifications of batteries.
In East Africa, the market for electrically powered transportation like e-motorbikes has grown rapidly in the past few years, attributable to growing technological readiness. In 2021, there were 18 e-mobility companies in Kenya alone, but the country and region have limited infrastructure to manage the large batteries used in these bikes when they stop working. M-KOPA recognised the problem and the significant e-waste reduction, mitigation, and impact opportunities using smart batteries and worked to identify a solution for the projected battery waste from e-bikes.
Key Learnings from the Challenge
The Challenge offered important learnings that could benefit the sector at large, below we summarise some of the key take-aways.
Regular and granular data is valuable for e-waste mitigation. It informs battery design, maintenance and by extension, operational logistics. In addition, data collected at the cell-level informs vital battery performance aspects such as capacity degradation, state of charge estimates and cell balancing. However, collecting such data requires selection of suitable smart components. Furthermore, it may require close engagement with the manufacturer of various components, such as the battery management system (BMS) integrated chip and the battery cell manufacturer.
There is a high return on investment for the advanced smart battery chips for higher value products (e.g., solar-powered fridges, e-motorbikes, etc.) than for lower value solar home system products (lights, torches, radios, TV’s). This is because the smart integrated chip increases the overall cost of the product. In the case of smaller, lower value products, this cost would likely be passed on to the end user and decrease affordability.
The economic viability of second-life use of lithium-Ion battery packs is dependent on the battery design. Battery reuse can happen in three ways:
- Direct repurposing of the original battery pack
- Rework and redesign of the original battery pack into a new pack
- Battery pack breakdown for individual cell reuse
The decision is dependent on the end use application which can include stationary power requirements or smaller portable power applications such as power banks.
Key considerations for batteries used in e-mobility applications include:
- identification of relevant data categories to collect. This can include primary technical data for example voltage, current etc., or secondary data to monitor safety and reliability
- data resolution to detect inhomogeneities across cells in a battery pack and
- data collection strategies based on factors such a latency, quantity and cost.
Smart Batteries Can Benefit All
A smart BMS benefits nearly all stakeholders along a battery’s value chain. Customers benefit from fewer faults and decreased downtime during fault resolution; for the product owner, such as M-KOPA, it’s an opportunity to meet sustainability and consumer protection goals by providing better performing products that contribute to a circular economy.
M-KOPA will use learnings from the project to demonstrate that the solar-powered electric motorbike is an ideal use case for smart battery chips. By replicating and scaling this BMS model, M-KOPA hopes to reduce and mitigate the risk of e-waste in East Africa, while also offering a new business opportunity for battery stakeholders.
This article is part of a series of Spotlight Articles on the four Global LEAP Awards Solar E-Waste Challenge finalists. Learn more about the Challenge.
