PFI-RP: Developing Cost Effective, Safe, and Sustainable Batteries for Grid Energy Storage

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation – Research Partnerships (PFI-RP) project is to develop a cost effective, safe, and sustainable technology for large scale grid energy storage in the U.S. If successful, the project will dramatically improve the grid’s resilience toward electricity demand/supply fluctuations as well as against natural disasters such as fires and hurricanes that can cripple today’s infrastructure.

The project will accelerate the technological understanding of next generation battery energy storage devices, through university-industry joint research and development. Commercialization of affordable and safe energy storage will place power directly into people’s lives, with storage in every home, community, city and locations far from the grid, reducing transmission losses and lowering costs for ratepayers.

Positive economic impact will be created from increased small-business partnerships. Due to skilled labor requirements in product manufacturing, commercialization will generate new energy-related job opportunities. Workers trained in this field will gain lasting skills relevant to the rapidly growing energy industry.

In line with the U.S. goal to expand energy infrastructure over the next few decades, continued expansion and deployment of distributed energy storage systems would ensure sustained economic opportunities and employment for communities facing employment uncertainties in traditional industries.

The project seeks to develop and commercialize a sodium-based all solid-state battery. While today’s stationary electrical storage is dominated by lithium ion batteries, they can be unsafe, costly and unsustainable for continued ubiquitous adoption. In this project, sodium all solid-state batteries may be an alternative, matching today’s batteries in volumetric energy and power density, with improved safety.

Sodium-based batters may be able to operate over wide temperature ranges, owing to their use of inorganic non-flammable solid electrolytes alleviating fire hazards risks. Moreover, sodium all solid-state batteries offer much lower costs from the use of highly abundant sodium, eliminating expensive elements. This project will explore fundamental strategies to build a >1 Ah prototype battery with high volumetric energy densities of > 600 Wh/L and achieve 80% capacity retention over 1000 cycles. Fabrication costs will be modelled with a target of <$80/kWh. These goals are achieved through four major tasks: 1) Design new materials and structures that meet key performance metrics; 2) Develop scalable manufacturing of materials needed to support future large volume fabrication; 3) Modelling production workflow to optimize economic viability of designs; and 4) Evaluation and testing of prototypes that meet target metrics set in the project.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.