What Actually Happened

On June 4, 2026, Waymo and B2U Storage Solutions announced a "strategic supply agreement" to repurpose batteries from Waymo's robotaxi fleet for stationary grid energy storage.

B2U will take batteries that Waymo either retires from end-of-life vehicles or swaps out during proactive fleet maintenance — then deploy them at large storage facilities that absorb excess renewable energy during low-demand periods and push it back to the grid at peak demand.

The deal targets deployment in California and Texas, according to TechCrunch.

The Numbers That Actually Matter

Waymo currently operates nearly 4,000 vehicles, the vast majority of which are Jaguar I-Pace EVs with 90 kWh lithium-ion battery packs. The company has also begun rolling out its Ojai robotaxi — built by Chinese automaker Zeekr — which carries a 93 kWh battery.

Waymo told Ars Technica the partnership could eventually contribute hundreds of megawatt-hours of stationary storage capacity. That figure is a ceiling estimate based on fleet scale over time, not a guaranteed deployment. No specific project size was announced.

Freeman Hall, CEO of B2U Storage Solutions, told Ars Technica the math works because Waymo puts far more miles on its vehicles than the average consumer EV. That means more batteries cycling through the system, more frequently.

Why Batteries Get Swapped Before Vehicles Die

Waymo's "proactive maintenance" model means batteries don't always leave service because a vehicle is scrapped — sometimes the company swaps them out mid-life to keep fleet efficiency high.

Adam Lenz, Waymo's head of sustainability and environment, told Ars Technica: "That's when we look to these second-life applications, because there's still a lot of life left in the battery."

How much life? A 2025 analysis by telematics company Geotab covering over 22,700 EVs across 21 models found average battery capacity loss of about 2.3 percent per year. After eight years, that leaves batteries with more than 81 percent of original capacity. A robotaxi battery being swapped proactively for efficiency reasons — not end-of-life — likely still holds substantial charge capacity.

Waymo did NOT disclose the average mileage threshold at which it swaps or retires batteries. That's a meaningful gap in the story.

This Isn't a Charity Play — It's Business

B2U exists to extract residual commercial value from used EV batteries. This is not recycling. It's repurposing. The distinction matters.

Recycling shreds a battery and recovers raw materials — lithium, cobalt, manganese. That's energy-intensive and expensive. Repurposing keeps the battery intact and running for a second application that doesn't demand peak automotive performance. It's cheaper, faster, and extracts more economic value per battery.

TechCrunch noted that B2U is one of several companies operating in this space. Redwood Materials — founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel and backed partly by Waymo's parent company Alphabet — recently launched its own second-life battery storage business. That Alphabet connection is significant: Waymo's parent is already financially tied to a competitor in this exact space. The Waymo-B2U deal, then, is also a business positioning move, not just a sustainability announcement.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Missing

The tech press is treating this as a clean climate win and largely leaving it there. A few things deserve closer attention:

First, "hundreds of megawatt-hours" is a projection, not a contract. No one has confirmed a specific deployment size, timeline, or grid interconnection agreement. This is a supply deal — not a grid project announcement.

Second, Waymo's fleet includes vehicles made by Zeekr, a Chinese automotive brand. Those vehicles carry Chinese-manufactured battery cells. As the fleet grows and more Zeekr-origin batteries flow through B2U's system into American grid infrastructure, that's a supply chain question worth asking — especially given ongoing federal scrutiny of Chinese-made components in U.S. energy systems. Nobody in the coverage raised it.

Third, the economics of second-life storage remain unproven at scale. B2U has done this before with other EV batteries — but a deal of this potential magnitude with a single fleet operator is new territory. The degradation variability across thousands of robotaxi batteries, each with different duty cycles, creates real engineering complexity for grid applications that demand consistent performance.

What This Means for Regular People

If B2U actually deploys hundreds of megawatt-hours of storage using Waymo batteries, that's genuinely useful grid infrastructure — capacity that can smooth out renewable energy's intermittency problem without building new storage from scratch.

For ratepayers in California and Texas, functional grid storage helps prevent the kind of demand-spike price surges that show up on electricity bills. That's a tangible benefit.

For taxpayers, this is private capital doing something constructive — no federal subsidy announcement was attached to this deal.

But don't let the press release energy fool you. This is a supply agreement between two companies with aligned financial interests. The grid benefits are real if execution follows. We're not there yet.