Batteries are reshaping the U.S. energy system, not to mention the automotive and defense industries. But the movement to unlock affordable battery recycling just hit another setback.
The startup Ascend Elements has outlasted several rival battery recycling firms that ran out of money. It has operated a battery-disassembly plant near Atlanta since 2023, and is building a facility in Kentucky to turn ground-up batteries into useful ingredients for new units. Now, however, the company’s future is up in the air: It filed for bankruptcy on April 9, with company leadership citing “insurmountable” financial difficulties.
Ascend’s descent is indicative of the broader travails of the would-be battery recycling industry, which was supposed to figure out what to do with all the old batteries that will pile up from the electric vehicle revolution.
In the early years of the Biden administration, it looked like the venture capitalists were about to instigate a lithium-ion recycling revolution. Safely shredding old batteries was time-consuming and laborious, and retrieving valuable components was even harder. VCs funded a class of latter-day alchemists who bragged about shredding faster and cheaper, retrieving nearly 100% of the useful material from spent batteries, and then selling it right back into the supply chain. But those entrepreneurs struggled to achieve that performance at real, commercial-scale recycling facilities. Several diminished their ambitions for what they could actually recycle, a retreat that typically presaged corporate collapse.
The Trump administration created an even more challenging environment for these companies. Last year, it killed electric vehicle incentives for consumers, prompting many U.S. automakers to lose their nerve and pivot away from assertive EV plans.
The faltering American demand for EVs — and the batteries that power them — has rippled through the supply chain. Ascend faced financial headwinds as buyers of recycled battery materials pushed back their timelines, company leadership told Canary Media last year. The firm also nixed plans to produce cathode active material after agreeing to give up a $164 million federal grant in 2025, and then lost another $110 million from a separate federal grant.
It’s possible that Ascend has viable technology but never got to fully unleash it. The company “had a long history of fiscal and operational mismanagement,” as its own president and CEO, Linh Austin, wrote in a LinkedIn post last week. He promised to use Chapter 11 proceedings to “reset and move forward,” not give up.
Some legacy recyclers are still shredding away, like Cirba Solutions, which launched 35 years ago. And at least one recycling startup is making news for non-bankruptcy-related reasons.
Redwood Materials has been grinding up gigawatt-hours’ of used batteries for years at its campus outside Reno, Nevada, down the road from a Tesla Gigafactory. However, the new initiative that Redwood has been proudly touting is not a recycling breakthrough but a clever reuse of lightly worn EV packs as cheap grid storage. Redwood recently confirmed that it will expand its flagship used-battery installation, which powers modular data centers, and announced this week that it will repurpose 100 Rivian packs to store energy for the EV company’s factory in Illinois.
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BYONCE takes the stage in Georgia
Data centers in Georgia have a new way to get the clean power they need: They can pay for it themselves.
The Georgia Public Service Commission just approved a program from the state’s largest utility that will let tech companies and other major power customers identify and commit to paying for solar, battery, and other clean energy projects. The strategy could keep the data center boom from saddling households with higher power costs — and inspire other utilities and regulators struggling with the same issue, Canary Media’s Jeff St. John reports.
“Bring your own clean energy,” or BYONCE, as supporters craftily call it, has also taken off in Minnesota, where Google has arranged a deal with utility Xcel Energy to power its data centers with clean energy and storage it pays to build. But as Jeff reported earlier this year, it’s just one way stakeholders are trying to curb data centers’ fallout on consumers and the climate.
A vote to determine clean energy’s fate
