BMW Group Malaysia has once again partnered up with Universiti Malaya (UM) for its second-life battery research initiative, this time around for the installation of a solar-powered smartphone charging station at the UM Central bus stop.
Running on second-life BMW EV batteries, this new smartphone charging station marks the first completed real-world application of the RE:GENERATE x Universiti Malaya research initiative.
Powered by Solar, Stored in BMW EV Batteries
The whole solar-powered smartphone charging station was engineered by Associate Professor Dr. Tan Chia Kwang and his team of researchers and PhD students at the UM Power Energy Dedicated Advanced Centre (UMPEDAC), with over two years of laboratory research being put directly into everyday use by the campus community.
Serving a central bus stop with over 3,000 daily users, the charging station uses lower-capacity battery packs that are better suited to the lighter demands of mobile device charging.
A key part of the two-year research process involves evaluating each battery’s State of Health (SoH) at the cell level. Individual cells are carefully assessed—those that have significantly degraded are removed, while those that meet performance thresholds are reassembled into new battery packs, ensuring that every repurposed system is both safe and reliable before it leaves the lab.
The programme has also created another version of this solar-powered charging station that uses higher-capacity battery packs, which are currently being prepared for deployment to Pos Sinderut in Kuala Lipis, Pahang, where they will provide off-grid electricity access to the Semai Orang Asli community.
Besides this smartphone charging station, this partnership also saw BMW Group Malaysia supplying its retired EV batteries to UMPEDAC, where Dr. Tan and his team of researchers and PhD students are conducting multiple rounds of testing to understand the batteries’ residual capacity and engineer them into a practical, solar-powered energy storage system.
