News

Gao Liu, leader of the Applied Energy Materials Group within the Energy Storage and Distributed Resources Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), was recently named to the Electrochemical Society's 2022 Class of Fellows. Established in 1989, the Fellows of the Electrochemical Society (ECS) is a body of renowned scientists and engineers chosen for their scientific... Read more

Ahmet Kusoglu, a staff scientist in the Energy Conversion Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), was recently named a contributing editor for the Electrochemical Society's Interface magazine. Published quarterly, Interface is an authoritative, accessible publication for those in the field of solid-state and electrochemical science and technology, offering in-depth articles... Read more

Priyamvada Goyal, a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), received the Best Poster Presentation award at a recent conference hosted by the American Chemical Society's (ACS) Division of Polymer Chemistry. Goyal's poster presentation focused on the integration of selectivity measures and property correlations for cation uptake in ionomers — a research... Read more

A new cohort of 11 scientists and engineers will join the prestigious two-year fellowship program at Cyclotron Road based at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Selected from a pool of more than 200 applicants, the 2022 Cohort fellows will work with Berkeley Lab scientists and facilities to translate innovative research into market-ready... Read more

Ravi Prasher, associate laboratory director of the Energy Technologies Area and senior scientist in the Thermal Energy Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), will receive the 2022 Heat Transfer Memorial Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). The prestigious award, established in 1959, recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of heat... Read more

Experts from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will play leading managerial and technical roles in the recently established Net Zero World Action Center to bolster DOE’s Net Zero World Initiative (NZWI). The NZW Action Center brings together 10 DOE national laboratories, nine U.S. government agencies, and philanthropy organizations to promote net... Read more

With the rise in renewable energy, as well as increasing uncertainty associated with outages due to power surges and extreme weather events, energy storage plays a key role in ensuring reliable power supply to critical infrastructure such as healthcare facilities, data centers, and telecommunications. Hydrogen shows promise as an energy storage solution, and researchers are developing materials... Read more

Researchers Use Novel Imaging Method to Characterize Nanoscale Processes The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has a long history of leadership in energy storage innovation, most recently with a game-changing Energy Storage Summit. Now, researchers have marked another advancement–a new methodology that helps to characterize processes at the interfaces... Read more

The need for negative emissions technologies to address our climate crisis has become increasingly clear. At the rate that our planet is emitting carbon dioxide – adding about 50 gigatons every year – we will have to remove carbon dioxide at the gigaton scale by 2050 in order to achieve “net zero” emissions. The U.S. Department of Energy has recognized the urgency of carbon dioxide removal... Read more

On the first Earth Day in 1970, researcher Steve Greenberg was one of 20 million Americans, then 10% of the population, inspired to take time to observe the fragility of the planet and the need to protect it. Over 50 years later, an estimated one billion people around the world—one in eight—are actively participating. In the early '70s, visionaries like Art Rosenfeld applied science and... Read more

Power plants and other industrial facilities often spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere like a leaky faucet. As governments around the world are striving to reduce and even eliminate their greenhouse gas emissions and reach “net zero” emissions by mid-century, they’re looking for technologies to help. What if we could somehow suck up all that carbon dioxide, like a giant vacuum cleaner? A... Read more

Record Amounts of Zero-carbon Electricity Generation and Storage now Seeking Grid Interconnection Berkeley Lab-led study shows over 1,300 gigawatts of solar, storage, and wind in interconnection queues – an indicator of a major energy transition underway, even if most proposed projects will not be built The amount of new power generation and energy storage projects in so-called... Read more

Hydrogen is a colorless gas, but when it comes to talking about it – there’s a rainbow of possibilities. Energy professionals often use a color code system to categorize hydrogen by the carbon-emission impact of its production method. This simplified naming system can help ease conversations about research and policy towards a clean hydrogen vision and decarbonized future. However, as more... Read more

A recent episode of A Day in the Half Life, a podcast produced by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), focuses on energy storage: What is it, why do we need it, and what are the latest advances? Host Aliyah Kovner talks with Noël Bakhtian, director of Berkeley Lab's Energy Storage Center, and Mike Gerhardt, research scientist at SINTEF, a research organization based in Norway.... Read more

Every year, 50% of the energy produced worldwide from coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, and renewable energy sources is lost as heat. This untapped resource could be a promising additional source of useful energy, and for decades, scientists have worked to develop efficient systems to convert waste heat to electric power. In a recent study published in Joule, Berkeley Lab researchers developed a... Read more

Dramatic cost reductions over the last decade in battery storage and wind and solar energy position India to leapfrog to a more sustainable system for delivering affordable and reliable power to serve near a doubling in electricity demand by 2030, according to a new study by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). India, with a... Read more

Trains have been on the sidelines of electrification efforts for a long time in the U.S. because they account for only 2% of transportation sector emissions, but diesel freight trains emit 35 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually and produce air pollution that leads to $6.5 billion in health costs, resulting in an estimated 1,000 premature deaths each year. What’s more, these deaths and... Read more

Could a tank of ice or hot water be a battery? Yes! If a battery is a device for storing energy, then storing hot or cold water to power a building’s heating or air-conditioning system is a different type of energy storage. Known as thermal energy storage, the technology has been around for a long time but has often been overlooked. Now scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory... Read more

Carbon dioxide (CO2), a product of burning fossil fuels and the most prevalent greenhouse gas, has the potential to be sustainably converted back into useful fuels. A promising route for turning CO2 emissions into a fuel feedstock is a process known as electrochemical reduction. But to be commercially viable, the process needs to be improved, to select for, or to yield, a higher amount of... Read more

Berkeley Lab has been awarded more than $13 million for five research projects that will accelerate the development of advanced lithium batteries and smart, connected vehicles, making it easier to switch to electric vehicles. The awards were announced by the Department of Energy and are part of a total of $209 million in battery research projects selected by DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office.... Read more

A team led by Wei Tong of the Applied Energy Materials Group in the Energy Storage and Distributed Resources Division is one of three Berkeley Lab winners of an R&D 100 Award for 2021. The team developed a unique layered-rocksalt intergrown cathode material for a new generation of lithium-ion batteries that offers higher capacity, faster charging time, superior cycling, thermal stability, and... Read more

Exponential energy storage deployment is both expected and needed in the coming decades. To that end, the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is hosting a summit on March 8 and 9, 2022, to discuss harnessing science, technology, and policy to accelerate energy storage solutions for our nation. The virtual public summit will convene and connect national... Read more

States are increasingly recognizing equity as a goal of utility regulation, going beyond traditionally stated objectives to ensure that electricity systems are reliable, safe, and fairly priced. But they are just beginning to grapple with how to achieve this goal. A new report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Advancing Equity in Utility Regulation, provides four... Read more

Rechargeable lithium-metal (Li-metal) batteries offer an opportunity to improve on the energy storage density of current lithium-ion batteries and meet the demand of new markets, such as long-range EVs or electric planes. However, they face major performance hurdles related to safety and quickly declining performance. Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National... Read more

Earlier this summer, Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm launched the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Energy Earthshots Initiative, and the first Energy Earthshot is the “Hydrogen Shot,” with the goal of accelerating development and deployment of clean hydrogen across sectors. DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) plays a leading role in the research and... Read more