Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise to address several amendments that I hope we will have an opportunity to vote on before this bill is completed. The first amendment is amendment No. 3131, research and development for secondary use and innovative recycling research of electric vehicle batteries. Electric vehicles, as folks generally understand, run almost entirely on lithium ion batteries, which are commonly considered to have reached the end of their useful life when the capacity diminishes by 20 to 30 percent. The range of the vehicle diminishes in a corresponding fashion. At that point, it is time for a new set of batteries. But the battery still has a lot of useful life. It still has 70 to 80 percent of its original capacity. So it has the capacity to be utilized in many other potential roles, including, possibly, stationary electric storage. This amendment instructs the Department of Energy to conduct research on possible uses of a vehicle battery after its use in a vehicle, to assess the potential for markets for those batteries, to develop an understanding of the barriers for the development of those markets, and to identify the full range of potential uses. That would be very useful to diminish the flow of potential batteries into recycling, to get the most out of the investment we have made in them, and also to diminish the cost of batteries, because the residual use means that they have residual value, and the overall initial cost would reflect that.…”