Vehicle electrification increases the fuel efficiency of the transportation sector while lowering emissions. Eventually, however, electric vehicle batteries will reach their end-of-life (EOL) point, when the capacity of the battery is insufficient for operating a motor vehicle. At this point, the battery is typically removed for recycling. This treatment of the electric vehicle battery is not efficient, as there is still a high enough storage capacity that they can be used in various non-vehicular uses. Unfortunately, there are numerous barriers limiting the adoption of re-used electric vehicle batteries. Herein, the authors analyze the limitations and current codes and standards that affect re-purposed battery pack designs. Utilizing these requirements, a bench test setup is designed and built, to determine feasibility of a repurposed electric vehicle (EV) battery for stationary energy storage in Canada.

Fossil fuel vehicles, emitting air toxics into the atmosphere, impose a heavy burden on the economy through additional health care expenses and ecological degradation. Air pollution is responsible for millions of deaths and chronic and acute health problems every year, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The fossil-fuel-based transportation system releases tons of toxic gases into the atmosphere putting human health at risk, especially in urban areas. This analysis aims to determine the economic burden of environmental and health impacts caused by Highway 401 traffic. Due to the high volume of vehicles driving on the Toronto Highway 401 corridor, there is an annual release of 3771 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e). These emissions are mainly emitted onsite through the combustion of gasoline and diesel fuel. The integration of electric and hydrogen vehicles shows maximum reductions of 405–476 g CO₂e per vehicle-kilometer. Besides these carbon dioxide emissions, there is also a large amount of hazardous air pollutants. To examine the impact of air pollution on human health, the mass and concentrations of criteria pollutants of PM_2.5 and NO_x emitted by passenger vehicles and commercial trucks on Highway 401 were determined using the MOVES2014b software. Then, an air dispersion model (AERMOD) was used to find the concentration of different pollutants at the receptor’s location. The increased risk of health issues was calculated using hazard ratios from literature. Finally, the health cost of air pollution from Highway 401 traffic was estimated to be CAD 416 million per year using the value of statistical life, which is significantly higher than the climate change costs of CAD 55 million per year due to air pollution.

Electrification of the vehicle market is aiding in increasing fuel efficiencies of vehicles while lowering emissions. However, eventually the vehicle battery will reach its End-of-Life (EOL) point, usually referred to as the point when the State-of-Health (SOH) of the battery is at 80% [1]. At this point, the battery can no longer be used in its original vehicle application, and must be removed for recycling. This has been shown to be uneconomical, since the vehicle batteries still have approximately 80% of their original capacity remaining [1]. Although no longer beneficial as a vehicle battery, they can be further utilized in a different application. Repurposing battery packs, however, can be quite the undertaking with many barriers limiting their adoption. This work seeks to understand the limitations and current codes and standards that affect repurposed battery pack designs. Utilizing these requirements, a bench test setup was designed, built, and tested to determine feasibility.

When Hurricane Maria struck the island of Puerto Rico in September, 2017, it devastated the island’s critical infrastructures, including the well-documented total loss of electric power systems. The strong interdependencies or associations among critical infrastructures in modern society meant that the failure of power systems propagated to and exacerbated the failure of other infrastructure systems. Moreover, these associations impact systems recovery just as they impact system failure. This study is a follow-up of previous research by the first author on Hurricane Maria. In this research authors extracted and quantified the recovery associations of Hurricane Fiona (September 2022) made landfall in Puerto Rico and inflicted considerable damage to its critical infrastructures. The recovery efforts following the disaster provided an opportunity to follow up on the previous research and examine the recovery associations. Significant money and efforts have gone into upgrading the infrastructures of Puerto Rico to make them more resilient to natural disasters such as hurricanes or tropical storms following Hurricane Maria. This paper explores the new recovery resiliency characteristics of Puerto Rico’s critical infrastructure systems (CISs) that the recovery efforts following Hurricane Fiona illustrate. This research shows that the power systems and other CISs of Puerto Rico are much more resilient when compared to their state of resiliency in 2017. Moreover, examining the recovery interdependencies reveals that some of the CISs are strongly dependent on power systems recovery. Outcomes of this study suggest that CIS relationships based on recovery data from Puerto Rico, are transferable to similar disaster-prone areas such as the Caribbean islands or other island nations, as they have similar characteristics and challenges.