Tuesday, 7 October, 2025 / Edition 79

As a Christmas gift, my family got me a Gold Cube so I could process the concentrates (cons) from my gold panning hobby more quickly. Processing was always a bottleneck in the workflow because I had to sift the cons through finer and finer mesh before hand-panning and plucking out the tiny gold flakes one at a time. Now, the hold-up is setting up a good water system.

Resolving bottlenecks and shortfalls is a common theme when developing new technology. We cover one such situation in Pakistan where solar panels have solved a bottleneck but may (or may not) be leading to a water shortage. Let’s dig in!

Sarah Compton

Editor, Enspired

Leftover Electrons Mean Another Market for Battery Recycler Redwood Materials

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While many businesses address one vertical and grow within it, others find new lanes they’d never considered entering.

That is the case for Redwood Materials, a battery recycling company founded by Tesla co-founder J.B. Straubel.

Materials mining: The materials to make an EV battery are often mined on the other side of the world, making them difficult and expensive to acquire—especially when you think about the sheer volume of America’s car fleet.

Reduce, reuse, and recycle: Redwood Materials set out to improve that supply chain by recycling batteries here in the United States and extracting useful materials. They noticed something about the batteries they were recycling, though: Most of them seemed to have at least half of their capacity left.

Built for purpose: Even though a battery might have drained beyond what is considered useful for an EV, there are often still a lot of electrons left for other applications such as an energy storage system (ESS), which requires a slower minimum discharge than an EV.

Redwood has a bit of a corner on the EV battery recycling market, saying it receives about 90 percent of all lithium-ion batteries and battery materials recycled in North America.

Supply and demand: Combining the need for energy and the more than 20 gigawatt hours of batteries annually delivered to Redwood Materials, the company started a new wing called Redwood Energy, which uses recycled batteries to build ESS based micro-grids.

Ready to go: Redwood Energy takes one gigawatt-hour from Redwood Materials and puts it in its deployment pipeline. Its first microgrid has a 12-megawatt/63-megawatt-hour capacity, delivered in partnership with AI company Crusoe.

Feeding the beast: Redwood estimates that more than five million EVs are driving on U.S. roads, representing an estimated 350 gigawatt hours of energy that will reach end-of-life in the coming years.

• With 150 gigawatt hours entering the commercial fleet annually, EV batteries could supply more than 50 percent of the entire energy storage market. 

Not alone: Redwood is not the only company filling this gap: Competitors include Connected Energy and Alleye in the United Kingdom.

To learn more about Redwood and their battery revolution, go here.

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Could More Water Lead to a Shortage?

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Access to water is considered a human right, but too much access to water can lead to waste and eventual shortages if not properly managed.

• For farmers, electricity can be the difference between having enough water for crops or not: Water wells that irrigate crops in drier parts of the world are driven by motorized groundwater pumps.

• When those pumps are run by the local power grid or diesel, the associated intermittency, expenses, and environmental impacts constrain the volume and quality of water the pumps can extract.

What’s new: With increased access to solar panels, farmers in Pakistan’s Punjab province, however, have options.

Aside from improved water supply, switching to solar panels can save farmers money. Sixty-one-year-old Mohammad Naseem estimated he has saved some two million rupees (about $7,000) in power since he bought his panels four years ago—more than quadruple Pakistan’s GDP per capita.

A switch up: But now, the increase in water supply is leading to less-intentional resource management.

• Farmers are able to draw from the water table more frequently because the water pumps have less downtime.

• Some farmers are picking crops that require more water, because they’re higher quality and command higher prices. The amount of land dedicated to growing less-water-intensive maize fell 10 percent.

•  The field size for rice in Pakistan has grown 30 percent between 2023 and 2025, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Running dry? According to maps published by water authorities and supposedly seen by Reuters, the water table has shrunk below 60 feet across 6.6 percent of Punjab as of 2024—a level designated as critical by the provincial irrigation department.

That’s an increase of roughly 25 percent from 2020 to 2024, while the deepest pockets—with water levels above 80 feet—more than doubled in size during the same period.

Controversy: Not everyone is in agreement with the assessment, however. Pakistan power minister Awais Ahmad Khan Leghari said it was a “misconception that solar tube wells are depleting groundwater… The land under cultivation hasn’t increased. They’re just replacing expensive diesel with solar.”

TBD: If farmers are switching just to save costs, then it makes sense no water depletion would be seen, but it seems equally as likely that the farmers would water their crops more and switch to higher quality crops.

Diving in: The role of geoscientists here is clear: accurate measurements of the impacts on the water table are essential to understanding the problem (and if there is one). We would also play a big role in forecasting impacts, taking into account withdrawals but also inputs and major rain events.

To read more from Reuters, go here.

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