IBC President Director, Toto Nugroho, said there is an interesting technology that can recycle nickel batteries used in electric vehicles, which involves recycling method covering more than 99 percent of battery components.

“The nickel that we have used as batteries for cars can be recycled, so we can reuse the nickel,"Toto said on Tuesday, February 18, 2025.

He revealed that the recycling plant will be one of the electric battery industry ecosystems in Indonesia, citing that this effort is to support the sustainability of the nickel industry in Indonesia through recycling so that it can close down the previous fear that battery nickel has no solution for recycling.

He cited that creating an EV battery industry ecosystem is not easy because it requires stages starting from nickel mining, smelters, chemical preparation and battery production. So it takes a lot of time and investment.

From the consumption side, he added, the main consumers of batteries are electric motorbikes and electric cars. These consumers are parallel to the very rapid development of electric cars reaching more than 200 percent.

"Previously, there were tens of thousands of electric cars in 2023, in 2024 it could be almost 40,000 units," he said.

In addition to electric vehicles, battery consumers will also be absorbed by the renewable energy-based power generation industry into battery energy storage systems (BESS). Currently, many new and renewable energy (EBT) power plants are intermittent.

Intermittency is a phenomenon where the inability of renewable energy power plants to produce energy continuously. One example is solar energy that uses solar panels to convert sunlight into electrical energy.