News Category: News

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.

“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.

“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 for scientific thrusts and faculty engineer 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.”

Prof. Shirley Meng, director of ESRA

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 will pave the way for innovative energy storage solutions that drive both U.S. prosperity and security,” said Argonne Director Paul Kearns. “As the lead laboratory for ESRA under the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Argonne takes pride in spearheading this collaborative effort that unites world-leading experts and taps the impressive scientific resources available in national labs and academia.”

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

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 programs with industry, academia, and government.

“Cultivating a diverse workforce dedicated to safeguarding America’s energy resilience is key to ESRA’s mission,” said Wei Wang, ESRA deputy director for crosscuts and director of the Energy Storage Materials Initiative at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “Through our strategic equity and inclusion initiatives, we plan to create a robust training ground for energy storage science from the undergraduate to postdoctoral levels.”

ESRA co-leads Berkeley Lab and PNNL together bring expertise that spans the energy storage landscape. Their state-of-the-art capabilities in energy storage technology discovery, modeling and simulation, and materials synthesis and characterization complement those of Argonne. Together, these national laboratories will help reshape the future of 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 collaboration among national laboratories and universities is crucial to discovering new materials, accelerating technology development, and commercializing new energy storage technologies. 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
• The University of Chicago
• University of Houston
• University of Illinois Chicago
• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• University of Michigan
• Utah State University
• Xavier University

By Paul Dailing

Stakeholders from academia, national laboratories and industry from major corporations to startups gathered on Aug. 16 for a soft launch of a new collaboration to transition the globe off fossil fuels in a safe, fast and cost-effective way.

The Energy Transition Network, based at the University of Chicago and led by UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Professors Shirley Meng and Laura Gagliardi, will connect fundamental research to early-stage startups and major corporations that can translate knowledge and innovations into climate solutions and well-paid jobs.

“As an engineering school, the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering has a responsibility and duty to enable our students to be ready for an ever-changing society,” Meng said. “As a university professor, I have emphasized many times that talent and ideas are our core products. We should serve as an incubator for entrepreneurs so that our students have a fourth career pathway beyond academia, industry, and national laboratories.”

At Friday’s event, Meng announced the ETN’s first three industry partner groups — Thermo Fisher Scientific, SES AI, and MTI Corporation — who will join the effort to make Chicago a global hub of energy innovation.

“Thermo Fisher Scientific is mostly known as a life sciences company, but there’s a generous part of the business that’s focused on material science applications, and the overarching mission of the company is to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer,” said Director of Market and Business Development Brandon Van Leer. “A consortium like this plays well into that mission.”

UChicago and ETN member companies will work together to scope and facilitate research projects, host thematic workshops and events, foster workforce development through internships and career opportunities as well as engage in other collaborative ideation around enabling the clean energy transition.

“As a university professor, I have emphasized many times that talent and ideas are our core products.”

UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Prof. Shirley Meng

UChicago PME Dean Nadya Mason compared the effort to UChicago PME’s work as a catalyst for Chicago’s ecosystem around quantum technologies, and the subsequent successes that initiative has seen.

“Humanity needs game-changing ideas and strong commitments to clean energy, and it’s not enough to do this individually or in a vacuum,” Mason said. “We can only solve these problems by working together, by bridging across science and technology and bringing together the best of industry, academia, and national labs. We need to jointly develop vision, strategy, and implementation, and we need to do it now.”

Part of a larger Energy Technologies Initiative

The ETN itself is just the beginning. The Network will be a driver for industry connections as part of a larger Energy Technologies Initiative — one of the three pillars of a new climate and energy institute the university plans to unveil on Oct. 30.

“At a high level, the goal of this flagship climate and energy institute is to unite and to bring together the university’s greatest resources — world-leading faculty, field-defining research, and a transformational educational experience — under one roof, and bring those assets to bear on solving what we think is the greatest challenge facing society today,” said Sam Ori, Executive Director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC).

The climate and energy institute will leverage Chicago’s existing resources to forge the region into a central hub of education, innovation, and startups centered on environmental issues.

“We have the nation’s largest cluster of energy technology researchers here, between UChicago PME and Argonne,” Ori said. “The Energy Policy Institute at UChicago is a world leader in developing policy frameworks and thinking about addressing energy environmental problems in a cost-effective way. All of those pieces going under one institute is a pretty powerful stake in the ground.”

“We have the nation’s largest cluster of energy technology researchers here, between UChicago PME and Argonne.”

Sam Ori, Executive Director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC)

Some of the political and logistical issues hindering the transition off fossil fuels are as complex as the scientific ones, said Sean Jones, Deputy Laboratory Director for Science and Technology at Argonne. The new coalition, he said, was designed to tackle all these challenges.

“Scarce resources, difficult overseas suppliers, and increasing costs are all obstacles to a clean energy future. We also need basic energy science to achieve fundamental breakthroughs for real transformation,” Jones said. “We hope that these new transformations will lead to new business opportunities in the energy economy of the future.”

Molecular insights, social change

ETN co-director Gagliardi, who holds a joint appointment with UChicago PME and the Chemistry Department, said the work will involve taking molecular engineering insights into new arenas.

“The molecular scale is very important because it is needed to understand the chemistry of these materials so they can be designed to be more effective for the application of interest,” Gagliardi said. “But then to solve societal problems like lack of water and excess of carbon dioxide, one has to go from the molecular scale to the macro scale and system scale. This needs scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, industry people, and policy people to work together.”

Xiao Ping Jiang, founder of ETN industry partner MTI Corporation, said that this type of academic partnership is not only beneficial for the planet, but for any company’s bottom line.

“Industry is a lot of things, but the number one thing is the people,” he said. “Universities send their students to industry, so partnering with universities is an investment in the long term.”

Kang Xu, Chief Scientist of SES AI, said university-industry partnerships can strengthen both sides — but only with the right partners.

“SES is excited to be a partner and founding member of ETN, because we believe that the strong leadership and the excellent scientific/engineering talents at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering will significantly catalyze the science and societal efforts to mitigate the existential threat of climate change,” he said. “Partnering with ETN also benefits SES in making better batteries because it brings the accessibility to the excellent research results of the faculty members, the high-quality students as potential recruiting source, and some of UChicago’s top facilities.”

“Partnering with universities is an investment in the long term.”

Xiao Ping Jiang, founder of MTI Corporation

The challenges are great, but the stakes for the future are greater still.

“We did not get out of the stone age because we ran out of rocks,” said Argonne Associate Laboratory Director Claus Daniel. “And we should get out of the fossil age long before we run out of fossil fuels.”

This will require UChicago, Argonne and private-sector companies each to focus on what they do best.

“The idea is really to build this ecosystem where the University’s true products are people and ideas. Argonne National Laboratory has the ability to help with the scaling, with the manufacturing, science and data,” Meng said. “We hope that establishing this ‘mind to line’ concept will help our industrial partners solve the industry-relevant challenges they face as we transition to our renewable future.”

By Paul Dailing

UChicago Pritzker Molecular Engineering Prof. Y. Shirley Meng’s Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion has created the world’s first anode-free sodium solid-state battery.

With this research, the LESC – a collaboration between the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the University of California San Diego’s Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering – has brought the reality of inexpensive, fast-charging, high-capacity batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage closer than ever.

“Although there have been previous sodium, solid-state, and anode-free batteries, no one has been able to successfully combine these three ideas until now,” said UC San Diego PhD candidate Grayson Deysher, first author of a new paper outlining the team’s work.

The paper, published today in Nature Energy, demonstrates a new sodium battery architecture with stable cycling for several hundred cycles. By removing the anode and using inexpensive, abundant sodium instead of lithium, this new form of battery will be more affordable and environmentally friendly to produce. Through its innovative solid-state design, the battery also will be safe and powerful.

This work is both an advance in the science and a necessary step to fill the battery scaling gap needed to transition the world economy off of fossil fuels.

“To keep the United States running for one hour, we must produce one terawatt hour of energy,” Meng said. “To accomplish our mission of decarbonizing our economy, we need several hundred terawatt hours of batteries. We need more batteries, and we need them fast.”

Sustainability and sodium

The lithium commonly used for batteries isn’t that common. It makes up about 20 parts per million of the Earth’s crust, compared to sodium, which makes up 20,000 parts per million.

This scarcity, combined with the surge in demand for the lithium-ion batteries for laptops, phones and EVs, have sent prices skyrocketing, putting the needed batteries further out of reach.

Renowned scientist David Keith has joined the University of Chicago as a professor in the Department of Geophysical Sciences to explore climate systems engineering.

Keith has worked at the interface of climate science, technology and public policy for over three decades, and is at the forefront of efforts to advance the science and policy analysis of solar geoengineering.

As nations work to begin transitioning away from fossil fuels, experts say that even the rapid elimination of carbon emissions cannot address the climate risks posed by the carbon already in the atmosphere. To head off the effects of rapid climate change, some have suggested using human technological intervention to blunt the effects of climate change.

At UChicago, Keith will lead a new Climate Systems Engineering initiative, which will explore multiple such strategies, including methods to reflect sunlight away from Earth—ranging from injecting particles into the stratosphere, to using ocean salt crystals to brighten low-lying clouds. Other strategies could include ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and more localized interventions, such as protecting glaciers.

However, because interventions can have global impacts, these technologies create moral, social, and political challenges that require deep and wide-ranging thought and discourse.

New faculty will be hired through the Climate Systems Engineering initiative. The aim of the initiative is to support new faculty with diverse expertise as well as current scholars at UChicago and beyond who are working to understand the interwoven technical and social challenges posed by solar geoengineering and carbon removal.

“Climate engineering technologies may allow humans to protect themselves and the environment in ways that cannot be achieved by emissions cuts alone. Yet these technologies bring environmental risks and pose deep challenges for governance. No one should be confident about embracing or abandoning these methods,” said Keith. “My only confident assertion about climate engineering is that open collaborative research today is vital to inform decisions our children must make tomorrow. I’m thrilled to join the University of Chicago with its commitment to open debate and its legacy of tackling society’s greatest tests.”

Keith previously served as the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics at the Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and as Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He led the development of Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program.

“My only confident assertion about climate engineering is that open collaborative research today is vital to inform decisions our children must make tomorrow.” — Prof. David Keith

His work has ranged from the climatic impacts of large-scale wind power to elicitation of expert judgments about climate. Keith’s hardware engineering projects include the first interferometer for atoms, a high-accuracy infrared spectrometer for NASA’s ER-2 and the development of a stratospheric propelled balloon experiment for solar geoengineering. He is also the founder of Carbon Engineering, a company developing technology to capture CO2 from ambient air and the author of A Case for Climate Engineering (MIT Press, 2013).

UChicago’s new Climate Systems Engineering initiative will bring systems engineering tools and climate systems science together to study these emerging technologies. It joins growing areas of research on related topics as diverse as energy storage, climate science, economics, environmental policy, sustainability, human behavior, history and environmental science already underway at the University of Chicago. It will draw on the expertise in the Department of Geophysical Sciences, across atmospheric and climate science, computational modeling and simulation, and geophysical dynamics, as well as other departments and divisions across campus.

“I have learned so much from David Keith over the years and am humbled to now have him as a colleague,” said Michael Greenstone, the Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. “The University of Chicago has long been unafraid to foster understanding in areas that have a direct bearing on human well-being. I’m confident that the Climate Systems Engineering Initiative will help the world better manage the global climate and energy challenge that all societies are currently contending with and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.”

“As atmospheric CO2 barrels past a 350-ppm safety limit, we need to think about how to keep a lid on things, like permafrost, ice sheets and rain forests,” said David Archer, professor in the Department of Geophysical Sciences. “We need to prevent irreversible changes to the Earth system, while our descendants work for the decades it will take to clean up our CO2 mess.”

“I’m confident that the Climate Systems Engineering Initiative will help the world better manage the global climate and energy challenge.” —Prof. Michael Greenstone

“Geoengineering is a controversial new tool in our toolbox for not only better understanding the science of climate change, including the impact of aerosols on clouds, winds and rainfall, but also potentially for mitigating the worst impacts of the climate crisis,” said Tiffany Shaw, associate professor in the Department of Geophysical Sciences.

The initiative will convene experts from throughout the University to explore geoengineering challenges surrounding human behavior and values, political, governance and legal structures, equity impacts, and more.

One of the primary goals is risk analysis—to be able to quantify how uncertain we are about the risks and rewards of solar geoengineering.

The initiative will require novel materials, high-powered computing, and trailblazing chemical and engineering strategies. Keith plans to partner with researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory affiliated with UChicago with deep expertise in engineering, climate science, and computational modeling, as well as supercomputing facilities such as the upcoming Aurora supercomputer.

Because any climate systems engineering effort would have worldwide effects, Keith said UChicago’s initiative also will seek partnerships around the globe because “human decisions that may alter the Earth’s future cannot be confined to any one nation.”

“I am thrilled to join our faculty in welcoming David Keith to the University of Chicago,” said President Paul Alivisatos. “He brings with him deep expertise and an innovative spirit, which will prove to be invaluable to our efforts to better understand and surface solutions for challenges related to the inextricably linked systems underpinning human energy, technology and the environment. With his arrival, we look forward to new horizons of discovery and impact in the emerging field of climate systems engineering.”

Original post on uchicago.edu