Voltfang CEO: Europe's second-life BESS market never materialised, and the industry should stop pretending it did

Writing in Energy-Storage.News on 14 October 2026, David Oudsandji - CEO and co-founder of Voltfang, the Aachen company that operates what it calls Europe's largest second-life battery factory - made an unusually candid admission: the European market for repurposing end-of-life EV batteries into stationary BESS is not working as the industry expected, and the sector should stop treating that as a temporary setback^[1].

The thesis that looked unbeatable

The second-life concept had serious analytical backing. A 2019 McKinsey report projected that second-life supply could carry a cost advantage of 30% to 70% over new batteries^[1], and a 2022 McKinsey study predicted 227 GWh of used EV batteries would become available for repurposing by 2030^[1]. The circular-economy logic was compelling: take a pack that still holds 70-80% of its original capacity, requalify it for stationary storage, and recycle it at end of second life. Raw material security, lower cost, lower carbon - all in one product.

Voltfang was built on exactly that thesis. Founded in 2020 as a spin-off from RWTH Aachen University, the company raised €15 million in a Series B round in June 2025 and opened a production facility scalable to 1 GWh per year, which it describes as Europe's largest second-life battery factory.

Where the supply chain broke down

The feedstock never arrived in the volumes the models assumed. Oudsandji identifies three compounding failures^[1]:

• EV adoption slowed sharply. New EV registrations in Germany fell 27.4% in 2024 to around 380,000 units, partly because the government abruptly ended purchase subsidies in late 2023. Fewer new EVs sold means fewer packs retiring into the second-life stream years later.
• OEMs kept the batteries they did have. The few packs that do come back rarely reach the open market. Carmakers are channelling them into their own storage projects, charging infrastructure, and fleet applications.
• EU recyclate quotas created a structural incentive to hoard. Under EU Regulation 2023/1542, new EV batteries placed on the EU market must contain minimum shares of recycled cobalt, lithium, and nickel from 2031 onwards. OEMs need to control their own end-of-life material flows to reliably meet those quotas - which means the open second-life market is competing directly with the automakers' own compliance programmes.

The result, as Oudsandji puts it, is that what was envisioned as an open second-life ecosystem has instead become a vertically integrated OEM supply chain^[1].

A structural problem, not a timing problem

The European Commission's own research body has flagged similar dynamics. A 2026 report from the EU Circular Economy Platform found that scaling second-life battery applications in the EU faces overlapping policy, economic, supply chain, and technical challenges, and that the landscape remains at a nascent stage despite several pilots. Lack of standardised state-of-health data is a persistent bottleneck: without consistent battery history records, repurposers cannot reliably price or guarantee second-life packs.

The cost squeeze is real too. Chinese LFP cells have fallen sharply in price, narrowing the gap that second-life economics depended on. McKinsey's own modelling noted that the 30-70% cost advantage of second-life packs was expected to erode to around 25% by 2040 as new-battery manufacturing costs continued to fall.

What Voltfang is actually doing

Voltfang has not abandoned batteries - it has broadened its feedstock. The company now draws on three streams: genuinely used EV packs requalified for second life, surplus modules from automotive overproduction that never entered a vehicle, and new large-format LFP cells for its grid-scale product line. The pivot reflects a pragmatic read of where European battery supply actually sits.

Oudsandji's broader argument is that the EV and BESS sectors still share real synergies - buffering applications for EV charging infrastructure being one - but that the specific business model of buying retired packs cheaply and reselling them as stationary storage has not scaled, and probably will not at the volumes the 2019 projections implied^[1].

What to watch

The EU Battery Passport requirement takes effect for EV and industrial batteries above 2 kWh in February 2027. If it improves state-of-health data transparency across the supply chain, the economics of third-party second-life repurposing could improve at the margin. The more important variable, however, is whether OEMs choose to open their end-of-life battery flows to the market or continue to internalise them - a decision driven less by technology than by the 2031 recyclate quota calculus.