US DoE funds two research hubs for next gen batteries

The US Department of Energy (DoE) has announced $125 million in funding for two Energy Innovation Hub teams to provide the scientific foundation needed to seed and accelerate next generation technologies beyond today’s generation of lithium-ion batteries.

These multi-institution research teams, led by Argonne National Laboratory and Stanford University, will develop scientific concepts and understanding to impact decarbonisation of transportation and incorporation of clean energy into the electricity grid.

According to a DoE-issued release, emerging applications in storage technology will require greater energy storage capabilities, safer operation, lower costs and diversity of materials to manufacture batteries.

Meeting these challenges requires a better understanding of foundational battery and materials sciences to enable scalable battery designs with versatile and reversible energy storage capabilities beyond what is currently possible. Additional benefits may include mitigation of supply chain risks associated with the current generation of batteries.

Commenting in a release was Harriet Kung, DOE’s acting director for the Office of Science: “Providing the scientific foundation to accelerate this important research is key to our economy and making sure the US plays a lead role in transforming the way we store and use electricity.

“Today’s awards provide our Energy Innovation Hub teams with the tools and resources to solve some of the most challenging science problems that are limiting our ability to decarbonise transportation and incorporate clean energy into the electricity grid.”

The two Energy Innovation Hub teams are the Energy Storage Research Alliance (ESRA) led by Argonne National Laboratory and the Aqueous Battery Consortium (ABC) led by Stanford University.

The teams were selected by competitive peer review under the DoE Funding Opportunity Announcement for the Energy Innovation Hub Program: Research to Enable Next-Generation Batteries and Energy Storage.

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ESRA

ESRA brings together nearly 50 researchers from three national laboratories and 12 universities to provide the scientific underpinning to address battery challenges, including safety, high energy density and long duration batteries made from inexpensive, abundant materials.

ESRA’s primary aim is to push the boundaries of energy storage science to drive technological innovation and strengthen US economic competitiveness.

In an Argonne-issued release, Shirley Meng, ESRA director, chief scientist of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science and professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, commented: “The demand for high performance, low cost and sustainable energy storage devices is on the rise, especially those with potential to deeply decarbonise heavy duty transportation and the electric grid.

“To achieve this, energy storage technology must reach levels of unprecedented performance, surpassing the capabilities of current lithium-ion technology. The key to making these transformative leaps lies in a robust research and development initiative firmly grounded in basic science.”

ESRA seeks to enable transformative discoveries in materials chemistry, gain a fundamental understanding of electrochemical phenomena at the atomic scale and lay the scientific foundations for breakthroughs in energy storage technologies.

“ESRA creates an energy storage research ecosystem with the mission to rapidly innovate, shorten the time between basic discovery and technology development, and train the next generation workforce,” added Bryan McCloskey, ESRA deputy director for scientific thrusts and faculty engineer in the Energy Storage and Distributed Resources Division at Berkeley Lab.

The Argonne-led hub will also place a central focus on training a diverse, next generation battery workforce for future manufacturing needs through innovative training programmes with industry, academia and government.

Argonne is joined in the collaboration by 14 partners that are embedded in all aspects of ESRA: participation in each of the scientific facets, governance and development of the hub strategy, and training of the next generation of battery scientists and researchers.

The ESRA partners are:

• Columbia University
• Duke University
• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
• Princeton University
• UC San Diego
• UChicago
• University of Houston
• University of Illinois Chicago
• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• University of Michigan
• Utah State University
• Xavier University

A new aqueous battery

At the same time as the hubs announcement from the DoE, the Aqueous Battery Consortium of Stanford, SLAC and 13 other research institutions, announced a project, aiming to overcome the limitations of a battery using water as the electrolyte.

The new research project aims to develop a new kind of aqueous battery, one that is environmentally safe, has higher energy density than lead-acid batteries, and costs one-tenth that of lithium-ion batteries today.

The group plans to keep costs for this future technology low by using cheaper raw materials, simpler electronics and new, efficient manufacturing techniques. The pursued technology is also expected to be safer and to create batteries that charge and discharge quickly.

However, “the barriers to such a new aqueous battery have stymied inventors for years,” said the project’s chief scientist, Linda Nazar, a professor of chemistry at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, in a Stanford-issued release.

Nazar has developed new materials for energy storage and conversion for the past 20 years, including aqueous batteries. “In addition to stubbornly low voltage and energy density, water can corrode battery materials, become the source of undesirable side reactions, and the cells can fail after just hundreds of charge-discharge cycles under demanding practical conditions.”

Said the project’s director, Yi Cui, a Stanford professor of materials science and engineering, of energy science and engineering, and of photon science at SLAC: “This project will undertake the grand challenge of electrochemical energy storage in a world dependent on intermittent solar and wind power. We need affordable, grid-scale energy storage that will work dependably for a long time.”

The Aqueous Battery Consortium, which will be administered by Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy, hopes to overcome all these challenges and, in so doing, advance battery technology broadly.

The team consists of 31 leading battery scientists, engineers, and physicists from 12 universities in North America, as well as from SLAC, the US Army Research Lab, and the US Naval Research Lab.

The research aims cover the electrolyte, both electrodes, electrolyte/electrode interface, corrosion and overall device architecture. Three theme teams will work on materials design and synthesis, coordinated theory and simulation, and characterisation of prototype devices in operation.

In addition to Stanford and the University of Waterloo, the other universities contributing investigators to this project are California State University, Long Beach; Florida A&M University/Florida State University’s College of Engineering; North Carolina State University; Oregon State University; San Jose State University; UCLA; UC-San Diego; UC-Santa Barbara; University of Maryland; and University of Texas at Austin.

Total funding of the DoE-selected hubs comes to $125 million ($62.5 million to each) for up to five years.