The public wish list for battery makers is pretty straightforward. People want batteries that work for days without needing to be recharged, don't leak or catch fire, and provide reliable energy storage for many years.
Our currently available energy storage technology meets those needs for several categories of batteries. But as a nation, the United States has an urgent unmet need for safe and reliable long-duration energy storage on a massive scale. Fulfilling that need will require new kinds of batteries capable of routinely providing energy to our electric grid and hauling heavy freight long distances.
The Energy Storage Research Alliance (ESRA), a new Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Innovation hub, will meet those needs by accelerating the discovery of new battery materials and chemistries that use Earth-abundant components and green manufacturing processes.
The ESRA hub, one of new two energy storage-focused hubs created by DOE, includes leadership from three national laboratories: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), and Argonne National Laboratory, which serves as the hub's headquarters. In addition, 12 universities will participate in ESRA research.
"The ESRA will provide a platform for us to deepen our fundamental research in cost-efficient battery materials and affordable technologies," said PNNL's Wei Wang, ESRA deputy director and director of PNNL's Energy Storage Materials Initiative.
Now is the time
The DOE investment of up to $62.5 million over 5 years enables the ESRA hub to put into place the scientists, tools, and emerging technologies to rapidly identify the most promising science-based approaches to large-scale energy storage.
"In the last decade, our scientific understanding of how to store and release energy in chemical bonds has advanced dramatically," said Wang. "Now is the time to accelerate that fundamental understanding of the materials, chemistries, and properties that show promise in long-duration energy storage. Working with our partners, PNNL will leverage its investments in redox flow battery technology, high-throughput robotics, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and the scientific acumen of our people."
Long-duration grid energy storage expertise
As our electric grid decarbonizes and comes to depend more and more on these intermittent energy sources, safe, dependable long-term energy storage becomes essential. PNNL battery experts have established scientific and technical prowess, and many patented advances, in one of the most promising ways to store intermittent energy: redox flow battery science.
Wang, a global leader in flow battery technology, and his PNNL colleagues are developing an accelerated approach to discovery of even more efficient and longer-lasting flow battery materials for grid applications. In 2023, his research team provided the first lab-scale demonstration of a flow battery working stably and reliably for more than a year.
Through ESRA, Wang and his colleagues plan to explore a vastly increased number of new battery materials and chemistries, coupled with artificial intelligence, to learn faster and eliminate dead ends and blind alleys in their search.
"The ESRA hub builds upon PNNL's past projects and capabilities for fundamental science in energy storage, which have grown and matured with DOE Office of Science support," said Karl Mueller, director of program development for Physical and Computational Sciences at PNNL.
A molecular digital twin
To speed their effort, the scientists will deploy two tireless colleagues that are always available for more experiments. Dubbed Albert and Beverly, these two custom-built units are part robot, part workstation, part intelligent database. These lab dynamos have already sped the PNNL team's pace of new battery materials discovery. Now, PNNL scientists will take them to a new level, collaborating with Argonne's artificial intelligence technologies. PNNL will also partner with scientists at Berkeley Lab who have a similar experimental system to look at solid-state batteries. The efforts will complement each other in the new ESRA hub, said Wang. Together, the team will be able to further accelerate material discovery and move to predictive material design through machine learning insights.
"We can use machine learning to correlate structures to their properties," said Wang. "If the machine learning algorithm learns enough from those data, then the next time we modify a new structure or come up with a new structure, the algorithm would be able to predict with high fidelity whether that new structure would have properties of interest."
High-throughput experimentation equipment helps PNNL scientists developing next-generation battery materials do in a day what used to take weeks or months. Watch the full video. (Video: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
"We know that chemical synthesis and experimental testing are the most time- and labor-intensive steps," said Wang. "The molecular digital twin will help us be more efficient with time and resources."
In addition to the digital twin, PNNL has signature characterization tools that will be housed in PNNL's Grid Storage Launchpad, a new facility dedicated for energy storage research that opened last month.
Click here to read the full Article by Karyn Hede, PNNL.
