BMW Malaysia and UM turn dead EV batteries into a solar phone charger on campus

KUALA LUMPUR: More than two years of lab work has finally turned into something you can plug a phone into.

BMW Group Malaysia and Universiti Malaya have switched on a solar-powered phone charging station at the UM Central bus stop, and the thing running it is a stack of BMW electrified vehicle battery modules that are roughly a decade old and no longer fit for a car.

It is the first completed real-world application to come out of the RE:GENERATE x Universiti Malaya research initiative, and it was engineered by Associate Professor Dr. Tan Chia Kwang and his team of researchers and PhD students at the UM Power Energy Dedicated Advanced Centre (UMPEDAC).

The bus stop it sits at sees more than 3,000 users a day, which puts the hardware in front of a large slice of the campus community every morning.

Also Read: Old BMW EV and PHEV batteries could soon power rural homes in Malaysia

What is actually inside it

The setup pairs second-life BMW EV batteries with second-life solar panels, so both halves of the system are hardware that has already had one working life. Supporting all that is a solar charge controller, a PV inverter, a Battery Management System and a USB fast charger.

Energy storage comes from three BMW modules wired into a 1.5 kWh pack. After rigorous testing, grading and modification by Dr. Tan's team, these particular modules give back 30 to 40 percent of the capacity they had when new.

They are the lower-capacity units from the team's sorting process, which is the interesting bit: rather than writing off the most degraded cells, the researchers match them to a job light enough for them to still do properly. Charging phones is that job.

There are four ports, three USB-C and one Lightning for anyone still running older Apple gear. Combined output is 200W, capped at 100W per port. With more than 3,000 people passing through daily, four ports is clearly not going to serve everyone at once.

Who keeps an eye on it

Data loggers sit in the system recording battery parameters and usage, and a trained group of students handles monitoring and upkeep.

Because the site is easy to reach, checks are simple. The maintenance load is light, mostly reading logger data and giving the hardware a periodic visual inspection.

The team expects at least five years of service from it, based on the current state of the batteries, how hard they are being worked and the depth of discharge. Actual usage patterns could stretch that further.

The rural half of the project

The campus charger is only one of two applications running in parallel. The higher-capacity packs from the same programme, the ones still holding up to 80 percent of their original capacity, are being prepared for Pos Sinderut in Kuala Lipis, Pahang, where they will give a Semai Orang Asli community access to off-grid electricity. That is the more demanding task, so it gets the better batteries.

Three lives out of one battery

The modules in the UM charger are near the end of the line. Given how degraded they already are, a third life is unlikely.

The Pahang batteries are a different story. Once they finish their stint powering rural homes, Dr. Tan and his team intend to rebuild them into third-life smartphone charging stations, taking a single battery from car, to village, to public charger.

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