New National Energy Storage Hub Will Enable Transformative Battery Advancements

Adapted from a news release by the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory.

Today the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the creation of two new Energy Innovation Hubs. One of the national hubs, the Energy Storage Research Alliance (ESRA), is led by Argonne National Laboratory and co-led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

ESRA (pronounced ez-ruh) brings together nearly 50 world-class researchers from three national laboratories and 12 universities to provide the scientific underpinning to address the nation's most pressing 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 U.S. economic competitiveness.

"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," said Bryan McCloskey, ESRA deputy director and faculty scientist in the Energy Storage and Distributed Resources Division at Berkeley Lab.

"The demand for high-performance, low-cost, and sustainable energy storage devices is on the rise, especially those with potential to deeply decarbonize heavy-duty transportation and the electric grid," said 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. "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."

Leveraging decades of national investment in basic sciences, 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. The achievement of ESRA's goals will lead to high-energy batteries that never catch fire, offer days of long-duration storage, have multiple decades of life, and are made from inexpensive, abundant materials.

ESRA funding by the Department of Energy is up to $62.5 million for up to five years.

Berkeley Lab's contributions to ESRA draw from its years of scientific leadership in energy storage research, which today focuses on working with national lab, academic, and industry partners to enable the nation's transition to a clean, affordable, and resilient energy future. Researchers from across Berkeley Lab work together to develop scientific and technical solutions to energy storage challenges in materials, manufacturing, and systems design. Lab scientists are accelerating the development of next-generation batteries, including understanding fundamental battery processes at the atomic-scale, such as how ions move and react.

In addition, Berkeley Lab's Office of Science National User Facilities - including the Advanced Light Source, the Molecular Foundry, and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) - offer world-leading capabilities in energy storage technology discovery, modeling and simulation, and materials synthesis and characterization. Other capabilities include the Materials Project, which harnesses the power of supercomputing and structural methods to inspire and design novel materials. And last year, the Lab unveiled the A-Lab, which combines automation and artificial intelligence to speed up materials science discovery, and which is initially focused on finding new materials for batteries and energy storage.

Argonne is joined in the collaboration by 14 partners that are embedded in all aspects of ESRA: participation in each of the scientific thrusts, governance and development of the hub strategy, and training of the next generation of battery scientists and researchers. The hub will also place a central focus on training a diverse, next-generation battery workforce for future manufacturing needs through innovative training programs with industry, academia, and government. The collaboration among national laboratories and universities is crucial to discovering new materials, accelerating technology development, and commercializing new energy storage technologies.

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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to delivering solutions for humankind through research in clean energy, a healthy planet, and discovery science. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 16 Nobel Prizes. Researchers from around the world rely on the Lab's world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.

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