The war unleashed by Russia has led to the seizure or destruction of a significant portion of Ukraine’s generating capacity. Before the Russian invasion, Ukraine could produce about 55 GW of electricity. Now this capacity has fallen below 20 GW. As a result, the Ukrainian power grid is experiencing a power shortage, which has led to long scheduled blackouts.
This created a great demand for charging stations, generators and other possible backup power systems. Among other things, Ukrainians began disassembling old, broken electric cars to use their batteries to power homes and small businesses.
For years, Oleksandr Benza, 30, has been buying wrecked Teslas at insurance auctions in the United States and importing them to Ukraine, where his mechanics would restore and resell the cars. Now, on the contrary, they disassemble the cars to remove the batteries and use the remaining parts to repair other cars. It turned out that electricians are able to do the dangerous job of separating Tesla’s working batteries into several battery systems – homemade charging stations.
«An old Tesla, including shipping costs, will cost almost $10000. And you can turn it into 12 batteries and also sell the parts»,” said Alexander Benza.
He named his company «Ukrainian Autonomous Systems» (Ukrainian Autonomous Systems). It offers battery systems with a capacity of 5 kWh. For an average Kyiv apartment, this is enough for about 10 hours of operation with typical use of lighting and home electrical equipment. If you save money, it can last for 2 days.
At least one car comes to the workshop for disassembly every month. Oleksandr sells some of the batteries he makes in this way to the army at no extra charge, but most of his customers are civilians. Over the past 2 months, demand has increased from almost zero to sky-high, and Benza expects demand to continue to grow as winter approaches.
Source: Financial Times