General Motors has expanded its partnership with Redwood Materials to cover every stage of the battery lifecycle — manufacturing scrap recovery, end-of-life recycling, and now second-life energy storage deployed at a GM factory. It’s the first automaker to hit all three with JB Straubel’s company.
The latest piece is a 1.5 MW / 7.2 MWh energy storage system built from roughly 100 repurposed GM battery packs, set to be installed at a GM manufacturing plant in Michigan. Redwood says the system will save the plant more than $3 million in electricity costs over its lifetime.
From scrap to storage: the full loop
The GM-Redwood relationship has been building for years. Through GM’s battery cell manufacturing joint venture with LG Energy Solution, Ultium Cells, Redwood already receives and recycles manufacturing scrap from U.S. production lines. When GM EVs reach the end of their useful road life, those packs also go to Redwood for either recycling or repurposing.
The numbers are substantial. Redwood says it has received over 28,000 metric tons of material from GM and Ultium Cells for recycling to date, with an additional 10,000 EV packs now in the pipeline for repurposing through Redwood Energy, the company’s storage division.
We covered the initial GM-Redwood energy storage MOU last July, when the two companies signed a non-binding agreement to explore turning both new and second-life GM batteries into grid-scale storage. Today’s announcement turns that MOU into a concrete deployment at an active manufacturing facility.
Redwood’s automaker Rolodex keeps growing
The GM deployment follows a pattern Redwood has been building across the auto industry. In April, Rivian partnered with Redwood to deploy 10 MWh of second-life battery storage at its Normal, Illinois factory — the first repurposed battery system at a U.S. automaker’s manufacturing plant. Now GM is adding to that with a system at its own Michigan facility.
Both deals feed Redwood’s flagship product, Redwood Energy, which launched in mid-2025 and uses the company’s Pack Manager software to stitch together packs of mixed chemistries and degradation states into a single dispatchable storage asset.
The largest proof point remains Redwood’s 12 MW / 63 MWh microgrid at its Sparks, Nevada campus, built from 792 second-life EV packs and powering AI data center operator Crusoe. That installation has delivered 99.2% operational availability over seven months of continuous operation, and the companies expanded the deployment in March to support 24 Crusoe Spark modular data centers — nearly 7x the original compute capacity.
Redwood, founded by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, reached a $6 billion valuation in October 2025 after raising $350 million in Series E funding led by Eclipse and Nvidia’s NVentures. The company closed an additional tranche in January, bringing the total round to $425 million.
The competitive context
The second-life battery storage market is heating up fast. The broader EV battery reuse market is projected to reach $62.7 billion by 2033, growing at a 28.6% CAGR, and second-life storage capacity is expected to scale from about 25-30 GWh in 2025 to 330-350 GWh by 2030.
But not everyone is surviving the ramp. Ascend Elements, which had raised over $1.1 billion for battery recycling and materials production, filed for bankruptcy in April 2026. That leaves Redwood as the clear domestic leader, with a two-sided business model — recycling on one end, energy storage on the other — that generates revenue from batteries at every stage of their lifecycle.
Tesla, notably, has been building its Megapack energy storage business exclusively with first-life cells. Redwood is building a parallel market in second-life, and it’s systematically locking in the automaker relationships to secure feedstock.
Electrek’s Take
This is a milestone worth paying attention to, even if the 7.2 MWh Michigan deployment is modest in absolute terms. What matters is the full-lifecycle lock-in. GM is now sending Redwood its manufacturing scrap, its end-of-life packs, and buying back repurposed storage systems for its own plants. That’s a sweet closed loop.
The economics tell the story. GM gets $3 million in electricity savings at a single plant, a disposal pathway for aging battery packs that would otherwise be a cost center, and recovered critical materials that feed back into new battery production. Redwood gets a steady feedstock of 28,000+ metric tons of recycling material and 10,000 packs for its storage business — from just one automaker.
We’ve been tracking JB Straubel’s quiet buildout of Redwood Energy since the Rivian deal in April, and the pattern is clear: Redwood is becoming the default second-life battery partner for U.S. automakers. With Ascend Elements out of the picture and Li-Cycle still finding its footing, Straubel has an open lane. The question now is whether he can scale the Pack Manager platform fast enough to absorb the wave of packs that’s coming as first-generation EVs from GM, Rivian, Ford, and others start aging out. The demand is there — the U.S. will need over 600 GWh of storage by 2030. The feedstock is building. This is becoming a real business.
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