Tech
German firm gives ‘second life’ to used EV batteries
A German company is putting used electric vehicle batteries to new use by stacking them into fridge-size units that homes and businesses can use to store their excess solar and wind energy.
This week, the company Voltfang—which means “catching volts”—opened its first industrial site in Aachen, near the Belgian and Dutch borders.
With around 100 staff, Voltfang says it is the biggest facility of its kind in Europe in the budding sector of refurbishing lithium-ion batteries.
Its CEO David Oudsandji hopes it will help Europe’s biggest economy wean itself off fossil fuels and increasingly rely on climate-friendly renewables.
While wind turbines now dot Germany’s countryside and photovoltaic panels are found on many rooftops, he says the country still needs to build up battery storage capacity.
“We want to ensure European sovereignty in energy supply by enabling renewable energy production through storage,” Oudsandji, 29, told AFP.
“We can generate enormous amounts of electricity from solar and wind energy, then store it in a decentralized way all across Germany and distribute it,” he said.
“This means that the more renewable energy we use, the more storage capacity we deploy, the less we need fossil gas or oil.”
Inside the site, technicians receive used EV batteries and test them to determine their remaining lifespans.
Those still found to be in good condition are reconditioned for their “second life” and fitted inside cabinets the size of large refrigerators—effectively huge power banks for excess electricity.
Among the first customers is the discount supermarket chain Aldi Nord, which wants to store power from its rooftop solar panels for later use.
Clean energy push
Voltfang, founded in 2020 by three university engineering students, aims to produce enough systems by 2030 to store a capacity of one gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity per year, enough for 300 homes.
It is one of many small steps meant to help Germany’s decades-old “Energiewende”, or energy transition.
Last year, renewables covered nearly 60% of electricity produced in Germany, and the target is 80% by 2030.
One problem for solar and wind is what to do on days when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
Such “dark lulls”, most common in winter, have at times forced Germany to temporarily import power produced by French nuclear reactors or Polish coal plants.
To guarantee a secure supply, conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government plans to build around 20 new gas-fired power plants by 2030.
The Greens and environmental groups have denounced this as a step backward in German climate policy and fear the country will not meet its goal of carbon neutrality by 2045.
Circular economy
Europe’s battery sector is still nascent but expected to grow fast.
“In our opinion, small-scale distributed energy assets such as battery storage will play a major role to create efficient energy systems,” said Marc Sauthoff of the business consultancy Roland Berger.
The stationary storage market is growing exponentially in Germany: about six GWh of capacity were installed at end-2024, up from 2.5 GWh in 2022, he said.
Voltfang hopes to be profitable by next year, Oudsandji said, though he conceded there are hurdles.
For one thing, the supply of used EV batteries is still small, given that most vehicles have been on the road for only a few years.
Also, new batteries, produced mainly in China, are becoming more efficient and less expensive, making it harder to compete against them with refurbished models.
Oudsandji acknowledged that testing and refurbishing old batteries “is more complex” than simply buying new ones.
“But the big advantage is that it is more sustainable,” he said. “It is cheaper and allows us to create a circular economy, thus ensuring Europe’s independence in resource supply.”
© 2025 AFP
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ISC2, the non-profit cyber professional membership association, has joined the UK government’s recently launched Software Security Ambassador Scheme as an expert adviser.
Set up at the beginning of the year by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), the scheme forms part of a wider £210m commitment by Westminster to remodel approaches to public sector cyber resilience from the ground up, acknowledging that previous approaches to the issue have basically gone nowhere and that previously set targets for resilience are unachievable.
It is designed to incentivise organisations to pay more attention to the security of software products, and supports the wider adoption of the Software Security Code of Practice, a set of voluntary principles defining what secure software looks like.
ISC2 joins a number of tech suppliers, including Cisco, Palo Alto Networks and Sage; consultancies and service providers including Accenture and NCC Group; and financial services firms including Lloyds Banking Group and Santander. Fellow cyber association ISACA is also involved.
“Promoting secure software practices that strengthen the resilience of systems underpinning the economy, public services and national infrastructure is central to ISC2’s mission,” said ISC2’s executive vice-president for advocacy and strategic engagement, Tara Wisniewski.
“The code moves software security beyond narrow compliance and elevates it to a board-level resilience priority. As supply chain attacks continue to grow in scale and impact, a shared baseline is essential and through our global community and expertise, ISC2 is committed to helping professionals build the skills needed to put secure-by-design principles into practice,” she said.
Software vulns a huge barrier to resilience
A study of wider supply chain risks conducted last year by ISC2 found that a little over half of organisations worldwide reported that vulnerabilities in their software suppliers’ products represented the most disruptive cyber security threat to their overall supply chain.
And the World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) Global Cybersecurity Outlook report, published on 12 January, revealed that third-party and supply chain vulnerabilities were seen as a huge barrier to building cyber resilience by C-suite executives.
A total of 65% of respondents to the WEF’s annual poll flagged such flaws as the greatest challenge their organisation faced on its pathway to resilience, compared to 54% at the beginning of 2025. This outpaced factors such as the evolving threat landscape and emerging AI technology, use of legacy IT systems, regulatory compliance and governance, and cyber skills shortages.
Pressed on the top supply chain cyber risks, respondents were most concerned about their ability to assure the integrity of software and other IT services, ahead of a lack of visibility into their supplier’s supply chains and overdependence on critical third-party suppliers.
The UK’s Code of Practice seeks to answer this challenge by establishing expectations and best practices for tech providers and any other organisations that either develop, sell or buy software products. It covers aspects such as secure design and development, the security of build environments, deployment and ongoing upkeep, and transparent communication with customers and users.
As part of its role as an ambassador, ISC2 will assist in developing and improving the Code of Practice, while championing it by embedding its guiding principles into its own cyber education and professional development services – the organisation boasts 10,000 UK members and associates.
It will also help to drive adoption of the Code of Practice through various awareness campaigns, incorporating it into its certifications, training and guidance, engaging with industry stakeholders and members to encourage implementation, and incorporating its provisions into its work with its own commercial suppliers.
The wheel on the left side has options to adjust actuation distance, rapid-trigger sensitivity, and RGB brightness. You can also adjust volume and media playback, and turn it into a scroll wheel. The LED matrix below it is designed to display adjustments to actuation distance but feels a bit awkward: Each 0.1 mm of adjustment fills its own bar, and it only uses the bottom nine bars, so the screen will roll over four times when adjusting (the top three bars, with dots next to them, illuminate to show how many times the screen has rolled over during the adjustment). The saving grace of this is that, when adjusting the actuation distance, you can press down any switch to see a visualization of how far you’re pressing it, then tweak the actuation distance to match.
Alongside all of this, the Falcata (and, by extension, the Falchion) now has an aftermarket switch option: TTC Gold magnetic switches. While this is still only two switches, it’s an improvement over the singular switch option of most Hall effect keyboards.
Split Apart
Photograph: Henri Robbins
The internal assembly of this keyboard is straightforward yet interesting. Instead of a standard tray mount, where the PCB and plate bolt directly into the bottom half of the shell, the Falcata is more comparable to a bottom-mount. The PCB screws into the plate from underneath, and the plate is screwed onto the bottom half of the case along the edges. While the difference between the two mounting methods is minimal, it does improve typing experience by eliminating the “dead zones” caused by a post in the middle of the keyboard, along with slightly isolating typing from the case (which creates fewer vibrations when typing).
The top and bottom halves can easily be split apart by removing the screws on the plate (no breakable plastic clips here!), but on the left half, four cables connect the top and bottom halves of the keyboard, all of which need to be disconnected before fully separating the two sections. Once this is done, the internal silicone sound-dampening can easily be removed. The foam dampening, however, was adhered strongly enough that removing it left chunks of foam stuck to the PCB, making it impossible to readhere without using new adhesive. This wasn’t a huge issue, since the foam could simply be placed into the keyboard, but it is still frustrating to see when most manufacturers have figured this out.
Don’t call them hearing aids. They’re hearpieces, intended as a blurring of the lines between hearing aid and earbuds—or “earpieces” in the parlance of Lizn, a Danish operation.
The company was founded in 2015, and it haltingly developed its launch product through the 2010s, only to scrap it in 2020 when, according to Lizn’s history page, the hearing aid/earbud combo idea didn’t work out. But the company is seemingly nothing if not persistent, and four years later, a new Lizn was born. The revamped Hearpieces finally made it to US shores in the last couple of weeks.
Half Domes
Photograph: Chris Null
Lizn Hearpieces are the company’s only product, and their inspiration from the pro audio world is instantly palpable. Out of the box, these look nothing like any other hearing aids on the market, with a bulbous design that, while self-contained within the ear, is far from unobtrusive—particularly if you opt for the graphite or ruby red color scheme. (I received the relatively innocuous sand-hued devices.)
At 4.58 grams per bud, they’re as heavy as they look; within the in-the-ear space, few other models are more weighty, including the Kingwell Melodia and Apple AirPods Pro 3. The units come with four sets of ear tips in different sizes; the default mediums worked well for me.
The bigger issue isn’t how the tip of the device fits into your ear, though; it’s how the rest of the unit does. Lizn Hearpieces need to be delicately twisted into the ear canal so that one edge of the unit fits snugly behind the tragus, filling the concha. My ears may be tighter than others, but I found this no easy feat, as the device is so large that I really had to work at it to wedge it into place. As you might have guessed, over time, this became rather painful, especially because the unit has no hardware controls. All functions are performed by various combinations of taps on the outside of either of the Hearpieces, and the more I smacked the side of my head, the more uncomfortable things got.
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