Glubux's Powerwall (2016)

>the solution came with rearranging and adjusting the cells to ensure the packs worked more efficiently.

>Glubux even began disassembling entire laptop batteries, removing individual cells and organizing them into custom racks. This task, which likely required a great deal of manual labor and technical knowledge, was key to making the system work effectively and sustainably.

This kind of thing is cool as a passion project, but it really just highlights how efficient the modern supply chain is. If you have the skills of a professional electrician, you too can spend hundreds of hours building a home battery system you could just buy for $20k, but is less reliable.

There HAS to be a way to automate this process and make it work at scale.

Yes, with cheap third world labour, the same way many other technological marvels of the modern era are "automated".

This can't be done remote so you will need to bring that labor to where the work is.

There's already a pipeline sending old electronics to cheap labor for possible refurbishing, recycling and/or incorrect disposal. A small percentage they repackage into replacement laptop batteries and ship back, but they could also send more of them back as a value UPS with different value add parts.

Personally, I expect there to be a massive conversion to USB-PD as the primary power in the cellphone only regions.