Moment Energy announced on May 19 that its battery management system for second-life energy storage has been awarded a UL functional safety certification, on top of the UL 1974 second-life cell certification the company has held since 2023. Energy-Storage.News, reporting May 20, called it a world first for a repurposed-cell BMS. The certification is the operational answer to a real question: can a system built around cells already cycled inside an EV, then pulled, sorted, and rebuilt into a stationary pack, meet the same safety bar as a first-life lithium-ion BESS?
The reason the question matters now is the prohibited-foreign-entity sourcing regime that the IRS made operational this year under Notice 2026-15. The §45Y, §48E, and §45X tax credits now carry a material-assistance cost ratio of 40 percent in 2026, rising five points per year to 60 percent by 2029. Cells alone account for roughly 52 percent of project bill-of-materials in a typical utility-scale BESS, which means any Chinese-origin cell content is structurally incompatible with the credit at this threshold. Roughly 70 percent of refined lithium and the same order of magnitude of cell manufacturing still sit inside Chinese supply chains.
Second-life cells are a regulatory hinge in that picture. Moment Energy’s claim is that a cell already inside the United States, harvested from a retired EV pack, is no longer foreign-sourced under FEOC treatment. The company is headquartered in British Columbia, building what it calls the world’s largest repurposing facility in Vancouver, and standing up a Texas facility to anchor US deployments. Customers are not yet disclosed in the announcement; the application set named is behind-the-meter, data-center, and commercial and industrial sites.
The volume here is not a primary supply lane for grid storage. The US retired-EV cell pool is real but small relative to 24 GW of utility-scale battery additions planned for 2026. The signal worth tracking is the regulatory pattern: the FEOC rules are forcing the storage industry to look at every legitimate non-Chinese cell source, including ones the market had previously deprioritized on safety grounds. Second-life clearing the safety bar is one more credible bid on a supply problem that is going to dominate procurement decisions through the end of the decade.
Watch for two follow-on signals: which IPPs or utility offtake contracts cite second-life as a FEOC-compliance path inside the next two quarters, and whether IRS or Treasury issues clarifying guidance specifically on the treatment of repurposed cells under the material-assistance test. The first will tell us whether the market believes the workaround. The second will tell us whether the workaround survives review.