Berkeley Lab spin-off company PolyPlus is making big strides in lithium-metal batteries, but there are research challenges and opportunities ahead.

Lithium-ion batteries have transformed our lives. Without them, we wouldn’t have laptop computers or cell phones — at least, not the long-lived, lightweight kind we’re used to — and in the near future they may become more important yet. With sufficiently powerful batteries, renewable energy and electric cars become viable, but we first need to [...]

U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced a multi-partner team which includes Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) for an award of up to $120 million over five years to establish a new Batteries and Energy Storage Hub. The Hub, to be known as the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), will be led by Argonne National Laboratory.

CalCEF, which creates institutions and investment vehicles for the clean energy economy, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) today announced a partnership to launch CalCharge, a consortium uniting California’s emerging and established battery technology companies with critical academic and government resources.

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab Director Paul Alivisatos today praised the agreement reached by the State of California, which frees some $100 million in funding for a statewide network of charging stations for zero emission vehicles.

New materials are crucial to building a clean energy economy—for everything from batteries to photovoltaics to lighter weight vehicles—but today the development cycle is too slow: around18 years from conception to commercialization. To speed up this process, a team of researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) teamed up to develop a new tool, called the Materials Project, which launches this month.

Lithium-ion batteries power everything from smart phones to electric cars, but especially when it comes to lowering the cost and extending the range of all-electric vehicles, they need to store a lot more energy. The critical component for energy storage is the anode, and Berkeley Lab scientists have developed a new anode material that can absorb eight times the lithium and has far greater energy capacity than today’s designs.

Berkeley Lab researchers have built a high-capacity energy storage device for lithium ion batteries by constructing a unique nanoscale sandwich of graphene and tin. The device is engineered to improve electrochemical cycling of the battery, which reduces charging time and allows repeated recharging without degrading battery performance.

Using the TEAM 0.5 microscope, Berkeley Lab researchers recorded the first direct observation of structural transformations within a single nanocrystal of copper sulfide. The results break new ground for the design of novel materials that will serve next-generation energy storage batteries and solar energy harvesting devices.

The battery research team at Berkeley Lab, recognized as one of the best in the country, is engaged in high-risk, high-reward research, striving for technology breakthroughs as well as incremental advances. Their work could help drive a transformation of the vehicle industry and make electric vehicles as common as laptops and cell phones for American consumers.