Old electric car batteries now power the Texas grid, delivering 28 megawatt hours to ERCOT from a second B2U site

Old electric car batteries power the Texas grid

B2U Storage Solutions brought its second Texas site into commercial operation on September 9, 2026. The site, called Bexar Martinez, near San Antonio, sends 28 megawatt hours of grid services, extra power a grid operator can call on to keep the system steady when demand spikes, to ERCOT, the operator that runs the power grid for most of Texas. Old electric car batteries built into stationary storage, batteries housed in a building rather than a moving vehicle, now power the Texas grid instead of the cars they came from once those cars are retired. The site brings the combined capacity B2U operates across Texas and California to about 100 megawatt hours, built from more than 5,000 batteries pulled out of retired electric vehicles.

Bexar Martinez proves that second life batteries can deliver reliable, cost effective grid services at scale.

Freeman Hall, Co founder and chief executive officer of B2U Storage Solutions. Source 1.

How B2U pays for each new site

The release B2U issued names the outside financier behind Bexar Martinez as a company called B2U Infrastructure Partners, without describing it further. In an earlier interview, Hall described a separate approach the company uses to grow, a fund built from a mix of outside equity, money investors put in for a stake in the company, debt, borrowed money that must be repaid, and tax equity, financing that investors provide in exchange for the tax credits a project earns. That structure lets B2U sell finished projects into the fund while keeping a stake in them, freeing cash to start new sites rather than carrying every project on its own books. No source confirms that fund and B2U Infrastructure Partners are the same entity, so this article names them separately rather than treating them as one.

Texas growth against the stated plan

Independent reporting from Utility Dive, published 6 days after the B2U announcement, confirms the 28 megawatt hour Bexar Martinez figure and the 100 megawatt hour combined total from outside the company, and adds that the storage pipeline B2U reports across ERCOT and other power markets already tops 1,000 megawatt hours.

That total pipeline is far ahead of the pace B2U itself stated for Texas alone. In July 2025, when B2U broke ground on its first Texas project, the company said it planned 4 total Texas projects and 100 megawatt hours statewide within 12 months. By September 2026, past that window, Texas held only 2 operating sites and just over 50 megawatt hours, about half the stated plan.

Cheaper batteries and more on the way

B2U says a finished project now costs 30% to 40% less than a new lithium ion storage facility, largely because the batteries themselves are reused rather than newly manufactured. The company also has a new source of retired batteries lined up. In June 2026, B2U and the self driving car company Waymo announced a supply agreement to move batteries out of retired autonomous vehicles into grid storage in California and Texas. Adam Lenz, head of sustainability and environment at Waymo, the only person quoted in this story who works for neither B2U nor a news outlet, said the deal turns a large fleet of vehicles into an opportunity for the grid.

Our shared fleet of EVs provide a massive opportunity to support the growth of clean energy on the electricity grid while expanding the circular economy.

Adam Lenz, Head of sustainability and environment at Waymo. Source 3.