Stanford University and Argonne National Laboratory will lead R&D efforts in emerging battery and energy storage technologies funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE).
The DOE announced yesterday (3 September) that it has committed a combined US$125 million to two Energy Innovation Hubs working on technologies for enabling emerging applications of energy storage for transport and the electric grid.
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The two new hubs were selected through a competitive process and comprise collaborations between the leader institutions and scientists from National Laboratories and academics.
Argonne National Laboratory, one of the DOE’s network of 17 National Laboratories that also includes the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL), heads up the Energy Storage Research Alliance (ESRA).
ESRA will bring together nearly 50 researchers from Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), as well as their counterparts at 12 universities.
‘Unprecedented levels of performance needed to beat lithium’
According to an Argonne release, the first of the two innovation hubs will focus on addressing ‘the nation’s most pressing battery challenges’, which include safety, energy density, and the ability to manufacture electrochemical long-duration energy storage (LDES) technologies from inexpensive and abundant materials.
“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,” Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science chief scientist and ESRA director Shirley Meng said.
Meng added that energy storage must achieve “unprecedented levels of performance” to achieve these goals, in the process “surpassing the capabilities of current lithium-ion technology”.
ESRA will receive half of the DOE’s announced funding, US$62.5 million, for up to five years. Alongside its overarching aim of creating cheaper batteries that can store and discharge energy for days without the risk of catching fire, the hub will also offer programmes of workforce training for a diverse and highly skilled future manufacturing sector, Argonne said.
Tesla board member and ex-Energy Secretary in aqueous battery hub team
Stanford University meanwhile will lead the new Aqueous Battery Consortium innovation hub, co-led by the university’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and scientists from 13 other institutions.
It has a more technology-specific focus than ESRA and will work on developing and deploying environmentally safe aqueous batteries that will nonetheless similarly target advances across metrics including higher energy density, safety, and duration.
Using water as the electrolyte in batteries has limitations, but if the hub is successful, it could mean devices that are safer and less complex than the current incumbent aqueous technology, lead-acid, while being made with cheaper and more abundant materials than lithium-ion (Li-ion).
Some years ago, a US startup called Aquion Energy gained some recognition and early signs of market traction for an aqueous energy storage technology, before going bankrupt in 2017. A revival under new ownership was touted a few months later but little has been heard since. The developer of the aqueous ion saltwater battery does have a website today, but appears to be selling portable lead-acid batteries as its primary focus.
The Aquion devices were huge and cumbersome compared to lithium-ion systems of similar output and capacity, and the new innovation hub’s chief scientist, University of Waterloo chemistry professor Linda Nazar said energy density is one of the chief barriers to adoption for aqueous electrolyte.
Alongside that, aqueous batteries are typically very low voltage, Nazar said, while water “can corrode battery materials, become the source of undesirable side reactions,” and often batteries that use it fail after just a few hundred cycles, as opposed to the thousands that can be achieved with Li-ion or other tech like flow batteries.
No one yet knows the answer to “hard problems” like achieving control of charge transfer between solids and water, “from the molecular to the device scale,” and get reversibility with efficiency of close to 100%, project director Yi Cui, a Stanford professor of disciplines including materials science and engineering and professor of photon science at SLAC National Accelerator, said.
“We don’t know the solutions to those hard problems, but with the Department of Energy’s support we intend to find out.”
The aqueous battery project, which will receive an equal share of up to US$62.5 million, also brings on board a number of other well-known names in science and the tech industry, including former US Secretary of Energy, the Nobel Prize physicist Steven Chu, and Ira Ehrenpreis of investment fund DBL Partners, perhaps best known as an early and longstanding backer to Tesla.
The initiative is, of course, just one in a line of funding commitments from the US Department of Energy focused on energy storage, and on emerging and long-duration tech in particular, where the department’s Energy Storage Grand Challenge R&D track aims to reduce the cost of LDES by 90% within this decade.
Most recently, National Lab PNNL opened the Grid Storage Launchpad research centre in Washington State, and a few weeks before, the DOE offered up to US$100 million in funding for LDES pilot projects that utilise non-lithium technology.
