The Joint Center for Energy Storage Research
The Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is an Energy Innovation Hub designed to leapfrog current lithium-ion battery technology. Established in 2012 and led by Argonne National Laboratory, JCESR is a consortium of national laboratories, universities, and industrial partners whose mission is to design and build transformative materials that lay the foundation for the next generation of batteries. It is one of five Energy Innovation Hubs funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Physicist George Crabtree has served as JCESR director since its founding.
First five years of JCESR
The founding mission of JCESR was to develop next-generation batteries that would surpass lithium-ion batteries in performance and cost. The aim was to one day transform transportation and the electric grid in the way that lithium-ion batteries transformed personal electronics.[1].
In a lithium-ion battery, lithium ions are driven back and forth between a solid cathode and solid anode through the medium of a liquid electrolyte to store and release electricity. “Beyond-lithium-ion” batteries use different battery materials, chemistries, and architectures with the aim of greatly improved performance at lower cost. During its first five-year charter, JCESR set a goal a creating a battery five times more powerful and five times cheaper within five years.
Such batteries would allow inexpensive electric cars to drive five times farther on a single charge, rivaling the 400-mile range of conventional gasoline cars, and they would make storing and releasing electricity on the grid just as cheap as generating it with natural gas turbines[2].
Prototypes delivered
The JCESR team promised to deliver two prototype batteries in the first five years: one for the grid and one for transportation. These prototypes are meant to demonstrate proof of concept for next-generation batteries that go well beyond lithium-ion systems in performance and cost, setting the stage for the private sector to design and commercialize a new era of battery technologies. In the end, JCESR designed and delivered four prototypes, two for the grid and two for transportation[3].
A startup company, Form Energy based in Somerville, Massachusetts, is now pursuing commercialization based on one of JCESR’s prototypes for the electric grid — a liquid-solution-based battery that uses low-cost sulfur as the anode and water as the electrolyte, along with an air-based cathode. The materials cost for this battery is much lower than for lithium-ion batteries, and its operating cost could be as low as that of pumped hydroelectric storage, currently the dominant form of large-scale energy storage, but without its geographic limitations.
The key ion in one of JCESR’s prototypes for transportation is magnesium, which, compared to lithium ions, doubles the energy a battery can store or release in each charge or discharge cycle. With these and other changes, this transportation prototype attained a factor of three increase in energy density (amount of energy for a given battery weight or volume), which translates into an electric vehicle with a range of 700 miles. In related research with laboratory-scale battery test cells, JCESR also demonstrated the promise of transportation batteries that used calcium and zinc ions, which also at least double the energy a battery can store or release[4].
Advancing scientific frontiers
Flow batteries. Flow batteries are promising for applications in the electric grid. Both JCESR prototypes for the grid were of this type. They replace solid cathodes and anodes with liquid solutions infused with molecules that store and release energy. Conventional flow batteries are based on a single ion, with limited versatility.
JCESR introduced the concept of storing and releasing energy with materials called “redox active polymers,” or redoxmers, which are based on tens of ions. Compared to single-ion systems, redoxmers allow much greater flexibility to independently customize many aspects of battery characteristics and performance. Redoxmer flow batteries open a new window on flow battery design because they can provide high functionality at low cost, with little harm to the environment. JCESR’s redoxmer flow batteries have the potential to transform how we think about and use flow batteries for the grid[5].
Further, JCESR brought the emerging field of machine learning to bear on discovering and understanding new redoxmer molecules for flow batteries. Its efforts so far have produced materials with record high operating voltages and solubilities, both of which are critical parameters for flow batteries. JCESR is now applying machine-learning methods to produce a database of hundreds of thousands of redoxmer molecules that will provide broad new horizons for flow battery design[6]
Lithium-sulfur batteries. Another beyond-lithium-ion battery concept with high potential is a lithium-sulfur system for use in transportation: This concept uses a lithium metal anode and sulfur cathode and was the design of choice for JCESR’s transportation prototype because of its very high energy density and low-cost materials. JCESR developed two new cell designs with the potential to significantly extend the lifetime of lithium-sulfur batteries by better controlling the chemical reactions inside the battery and thereby increasing charge-discharge cycle life: One design uses an innovative electrolyte, and the other uses a polymer membrane. The JCESR development of this polymer membrane gave birth to yet another startup, Sepion Technologies based in Emeryville, California[7].
Solid-electrolyte batteries. Typically, lithium-ion batteries have a liquid electrolyte that is flammable. For some time, researchers have sought to develop batteries with all-solid materials — cathode, anode, and electrolyte — as a safer alternative. These devices replace the liquid electrolyte with a nonreactive solid such as a plastic, ceramic, or polymer. The major challenge is finding solid electrolyte materials that can perform as well as liquid electrolytes at a competitive cost. JCESR startup Blue Current, based in Berkeley, California, is working to develop a solid electrolyte based on a ceramic-polymer hybrid that would eliminate the fire risk associated with liquid electrolytes[8].
Research tools
To expedite energy storage research, JCESR established four new tools for battery research and development.
One is a techno-economic model for realistically evaluating the cost and performance of candidates for beyond-lithium-ion battery systems before they are made.
The second and third are the Materials Project and the Electrolyte Genome, two separate databases that simulate, catalog, and make available to the broad research community the energy storage properties of crystalline cathodes and liquid electrolytes. Calculations that use these databases have revealed otherwise invisible systematic trends in electrochemical behavior, allowed innovative hypotheses to be validated or refuted, and enabled rational selection of the most promising materials for testing in the lab[9].
The fourth tool is a state-of-the-art laboratory, located at Argonne National Laboratory and called the Electrochemical Discovery Laboratory, that is used to synthesize and characterize advanced battery materials at the atomic and molecular levels.
Renewal and beyond
JCESR was renewed for another five years in 2018[10]. It has since shifted its emphasis from specific battery systems to transformational materials that can be mixed and matched to build a diversity of next-generation batteries for current and future applications. This new approach calls for building battery materials “from the bottom up,” atom by atom and molecule by molecule, where each atom or molecule plays a prescribed role in achieving targeted materials behavior[11].
This research will be aimed at energy storage for a host of applications, including electric grids that incorporate renewable energy sources and provide more reliable and efficient energy distribution under all conditions, fast-charging electric vehicles, and even regional electric aircraft. While energy storage remains the key for all of these applications, no single battery type is capable of filling all the widely varying requirements. The mission of the renewed JCESR is to create the science to lay the foundation for a diversity of next-generation batteries for a diversity of uses.
Partners
The JCESR team consists of 150 researchers across 18 institutions, spanning fundamental material science and chemistry to engineering. Partners include DOE national laboratories, academic institutions, and an industrial partner.
The partner national laboratories are Argonne National Laboratory, Army Research Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
JCESR’s university partners are Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Kentucky, University of Michigan, University of Notre Dame, University of Utah, and University of Waterloo.
The center’s industry partner is the Raytheon Technologies Research Center.
References
- ↑ "$120 million to support next-generation battery research". UChicago.org. University of Chicago. Retrieved 10 November 2021.
- ↑ "JCESR accomplishments halfway through its five-year charter". www.anl.gov. Argonne National Laboratory. Retrieved 10 November 2021.
- ↑ "JCESR Annual Update 2019" (PDF). www.anl.gov. Argonne National Laboratory. Retrieved 10 November 2021.
- ↑ "Reshaping the future of the electric grid through low-cost, long-duration discharge batteries". www.anl.gov. Argonne National Laboratory. Retrieved 10 November 2021.
- ↑ "Active learning accelerates redox-flow battery discovery". www.anl.gov. Argonne National Laboratory. Retrieved 10 November 2021.
- ↑ Trahey, L.; Brushett, F. R.; Balsara, N. P.; Ceder, G.; Cheng, L.; Chiang, Y. M.; Hahn, N. T.; Ingram, B. J.; Minteer, S. D.; Moore, J. S.; Mueller, K. T.; Nazar, L. F.; Persson, K. A.; Siegel, D. J.; Xu, K.; Zavadil, K. R.; Srinivasan, V.; Crabtree, G. W. (2020). "Energy storage emerging: A perspective from the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 117 (23): 12550–12557. Bibcode:2020PNAS..11712550T. doi:10.1073/pnas.1821672117. PMC 7293617 Check
|pmc=value (help). PMID 32513683 Check|pmid=value (help). - ↑ "Funding for Advanced Battery Research Hangs in Balance". www.designnews.com. Design News. Retrieved 10 November 2021.
- ↑ "JCESR-Annual Update_Jan2019" (PDF). www.anl.gov. Joint Center for Energy Storage Research. Retrieved 10 November 2021.
- ↑ "Materials Project and Electrolyte Genome". www.jcesr.org. Joint Center for Energy Storage Research. Retrieved 10 November 2021.
- ↑ "JCESR renewed for another five years". www.anl.gov. Argonne National Laboratory. Retrieved 10 November 2021.
- ↑ "JCESR Fact Sheet". www.jcesr.org. Joint Center for Energy Storage Research. Retrieved 10 November 2021.
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