By Oliver Beckham
Rewind to 2006. Electric vehicles (EVs) were emerging, but—despite mounting pressure to decarbonize the energy sector—the research community had not broadly recognized the importance of energy storage. At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), battery research was practically non-existent.
Today, PNNL is lauded for its battery research, leading several major energy storage programs for the Department of Energy (DOE). So: how did PNNL go from a new player to a leader in state-of-the-art storage for EVs and the grid?
Plugging in
In the mid-2000s, PNNL posed a daunting question: what was the most important problem its researchers could solve with their expertise in materials sciences?
A group led by Jun Liu—at the time, a PNNL materials scientist and laboratory fellow—coordinated a year of brainstorming. Through discussions with experts from laboratories, industry, and government, the group landed on an answer: energy storage. With renewable energy booming and fossil fuel frustration growing, the country needed reliable, powerful batteries—not just for transportation, but for the grid, as well.
The team scoped the initiative, conducting the first-ever quantitative analysis of domestic energy storage needs and mapping the intellectual property landscape to understand where the U.S. and PNNL could play leadership roles.
“PNNL had strengths in materials sciences, characterization tools, and simulations—but we needed a strategy to apply and expand those capabilities to address the scientific challenges in energy storage,” said Liu, now a Battelle Fellow who holds a joint appointment with the University of Washington.
In 2007, PNNL launched the Transformational Materials Science Initiative, a five-year, $7 million internal investment led by Liu and Jud Virden, who now serves as Associate Laboratory Director for Energy and Environment.
“The initiative really kickstarted our efforts in grid energy storage,” said Virden. “It allowed us to bring researchers from different disciplines together to focus on key scientific challenges.”
Powering up
Early research under the initiative—on lithium and silicon anodes, sulfur-based batteries, high-voltage cathodes, functional electrolytes, and more—built fundamental knowledge to support next-generation battery technologies.
Projects ran the gamut from vehicle battery compositions (such as lithium-oxygen and lithium-sulfur) to grid-suited redox flow batteries that prioritized energy capacity (watt-hours) over energy density (watt-hours per cubic meter). PNNL developed capabilities to monitor battery degradation, including the unprecedented ability to use electron microscopes to watch battery capacity fade in real-time.
Other battery work poured in. DARPA funded PNNL research on primary high-energy lithium-air batteries. PNNL won the first award issued under the ARPA-E program for a proposal to reduce the operating temperatures of sodium-based batteries—research that led to those batteries operating at 50% lower temperatures.
DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO) selected PNNL proposals for competitive battery programs, and the Office of Electricity (OE) chose PNNL for its first major investment in grid energy storage research. Through the latter project, PNNL developed electrolytes that improved batteries’ energy densities and operating temperatures. Those electrolytes are now licensed to several companies.
In the early 2010s, PNNL’s battery researchers teamed with other national laboratories and the Office of Science to coordinate energy storage research. In 2012, this effort was formalized when the DOE—seeing value in combining this expertise—launched the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research with PNNL as a partner.
Building capacity
As interest in EVs grew, battery range posed concerns. In 2016, the DOE selected a PNNL-led team to lead one of the…
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