Rivian and Redwood Materials announced on Tuesday a partnership to deploy a battery energy storage system at the EV maker’s manufacturing plant in Normal, Illinois.
The premium EV brand will be using more than 100 second-life battery packs from its vehicles to provide 10 megawatt-hours of dispatchable energy.
Redwood Materials is founded and led by JB Straubel, a co-founder of Tesla who remains on the company’s board of directors.
Straubel left his role as Tesla‘s Chief Technology Officer in 2019 to scale the company, which recovers more than 95% of valuable metals — including lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper — from end-of-life batteries and production scrap.
The company launched its dedicated energy storage business unit, Redwood Energy, in June 2025.
The system will use Redwood’s Pack Manager technology to integrate retired Rivian battery packs into a stationary storage installation at the factory.
The stored energy will be deployed on-site during peak demand periods to reduce grid strain and avoid purchasing electricity at higher costs.
The companies described the project as the largest repurposed battery energy storage system deployed at a US automotive manufacturing facility.
How It Works
Rivian will supply electric vehicle battery packs to Redwood Materials, which will integrate them into a Redwood Energy system. The stored energy will then be used on-site by Rivian’s manufacturing operations.
The companies said the system is designed to be rapidly scalable and offers cost advantages by repurposing EV batteries that remain functional after a vehicle is retired.
Electric vehicle batteries are engineered to last hundreds of thousands of miles and typically retain significant capacity at end of vehicle life, making them suitable for stationary storage applications where energy density requirements are lower than in a moving vehicle.
First Direct Partnership
The announcement marks the first direct operational partnership between Rivian and Redwood Materials.
The two companies previously shared Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund as a common investor but had no public recycling, materials supply, or energy storage agreements.
Redwood Materials has built one of the broadest battery recycling and second-life networks among US companies, with existing partnerships spanning General Motors, Volkswagen Group, BMW, Toyota, Ford, Isuzu, and Panasonic — the latter being Tesla’s primary battery cell partner at Gigafactory Nevada.
The GM partnership, announced in July 2025, similarly focuses on deploying second-life and new GM EV batteries in Redwood Energy storage systems targeting data centres and the grid.
Redwood’s largest second-life deployment to date is a 63 MWh microgrid built with Crusoe, an AI infrastructure provider, announced earlier this year.
“EVs represent a massive, distributed and highly competitive energy resource,” said Rivian‘s founder and CEO RJ Scaringe.
“As energy needs grow, our grid needs to be flexible, secure, and affordable,” Scaringe added. “Our partnership with Redwood enables us to utilize our vehicle’s batteries beyond the life of a vehicle and contribute to grid health and American competitiveness.”
Straubel said “electricity demand is accelerating faster than the grid can expand, posing a constraint on industrial growth.”
He added that the partnership demonstrates how electric vehicle battery packs can become dispatchable energy resources for manufacturing facilities with high power demand.
Rivian’s Second-Life Vision
Scaringe has spoken publicly about designing Rivian‘s battery systems with second-life applications in mind since before the company began deliveries.
In a 2020 interview, he said Rivian was “already planning and designing for those batteries, after the vehicle, to be connected to a second-life use, in various types of grid storage.”
“To do that, you have to design the battery from the very beginning, such that the transition from a car to the grid is really easy,” Scaringe said at the time, adding that the company was thinking “on a multi-decade basis.”
Redwood Materials
Redwood Materials was founded in 2017 in Carson City, Nevada.
The company has raised approximately $2.2 billion across funding rounds, with a valuation exceeding $6 billion.
It operates facilities in Nevada and South Carolina, the latter backed by a $2 billion conditional loan commitment from the US Department of Energy.
