B2U Brings Second-Life EV Batteries to San Antonio Grid in ERCOT Push
B2U's second Texas second-life project costs up to 40% less than conventional BESS, and the company has a 1,000 MWh pipeline across ERCOT and other markets.
B2U Storage Solutions said the week of 2026-09-07 that its 28-MWh Bexar Martinez battery energy storage installation in CPS Energy territory near San Antonio had reached commercial operations — the California-based company's second project using repurposed electric vehicle battery packs to reach the Electric Reliability Council of Texas market.4
The cost structure is where the model earns its argument. B2U says installed costs for its second-life projects run as much as 40% below competing battery energy storage systems of equivalent reliability and performance. The installations also qualify for the Section 48(e) investment tax credit's domestic content bonus adder. In a market where BESS financing has grown more complex, that combination pulls hard on developer economics.4
Both Texas projects carry rated power capacity around 10 MW. Projects at that scale fall below the threshold for faster energization under ERCOT's interconnection process for smaller installations, compressing the timeline from contract to first revenue. For a company deploying incremental capacity rather than utility-scale blocks, that procedural edge matters.4
B2U's feedstock is retired EV battery packs. EV sales have slowed this year following the sunsetting of the federal purchase credit in September 2025, but CEO Freeman Hall told Utility Dive that his company's sourcing has not been disrupted. The stock of aging packs from earlier model years continues to come available regardless of what new-car sales are doing this year.4
The battery degradation numbers give some support to that supply thesis. Geotab's 2024 analysis of 11 EV models found an average annual degradation rate of 1.8%, leaving the typical car battery with roughly 91% usable capacity after five years — enough remaining performance to serve grid storage before final retirement.4
B2U said it expects to deploy more than 50 MWh in ERCOT over the next six months. Total operational second-life installations now exceed 100 MWh, and the company's overall pipeline runs past 1,000 MWh across front-of-meter and behind-the-meter projects in ERCOT and other markets, Hall said in an email to Utility Dive.4
The segment remains small. Anurag Srivastava, an electrical engineering professor at West Virginia University, told IEEE Spectrum in July 2026 that second-life batteries account for less than 3% of deployed energy storage capacity globally but could reach 20% to 25% in the 2030s if battery economics hold and collection logistics keep up with the growing volume of aging packs. That trajectory depends on assumptions B2U is now testing in the field.4
ERCOT's storage market adds its own context. Battery storage projects in Texas have an average online duration of 1.6 hours for operational projects, shorter than most other states and shaped by how the Texas power market dispatches ancillary services, according to data from the American Clean Power Association. B2U's project profile sits comfortably within that range.3
Elsewhere in ERCOT, Spearmint Energy closed a $450 million financing package in May 2026 for its 300 MW/600 MWh Red Egret conventional lithium-ion project in Texas City, targeting 2027 commercial operations, and the company already operates 350 MW/700 MWh of BESS in the market. The scale difference between Spearmint and B2U is wide, but both reflect the same Texas demand pull — load growth is drawing in storage capacity across technology types and cost tiers.1,2
B2U's 50 MWh ERCOT commitment for the next six months puts a concrete test in front of its supply chain. Sourcing, testing, and deploying used EV packs at that pace — without the cell-consistency guarantees available in new-build BESS procurement — is the operational variable the pipeline numbers do not settle. Execution on that commitment, not the 1,000 MWh target, is what the next few quarters will measure.4