Technology

The way lithium batteries work, they wear out less if you only discharge and charge them slightly. So a battery that is charged to 60%, discharged to 40%, and repeated like that will keep most of its capacity even after years of prolonged use. On the other hand, charging a battery quickly, until it is full, or discharging it until it is nearly empty will reduce its capacity over time.

A Tesla Model 3 has a battery capacity of at least 50 kWh. Even if it has lost half of its capacity, the 20% capacity difference between 60% and 40% charge, or more realistically, the 50% difference between 75% and 25%, still represents 12.5 kWh of capacity. Suppose you had an array of 1,000 such batteries. That would represent 12.5 MWh of storage capacity, enough to power ten thousand homes (at 1.2 kW each) for an hour. Certainly nothing to sneeze at.