News

The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has named Rachel Slaybaugh, associate professor of nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley, to lead Berkeley Lab’s Cyclotron Road Division. The announcement follows an international search. Until recently, Slaybaugh served as a program director at DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), whose mission... Read more

Understanding how matter interacts with light – its optical properties – is critical in a myriad of energy and biomedical technologies, such as targeted drug delivery, quantum dots, fuel combustion, and cracking of biomass. But calculating these properties is computationally intensive, and the inverse problem – designing a structure with desired optical properties – is even harder. Now... Read more

The Bay Area Battery Summit (BABS) just concluded its sixth annual conference, which was held virtually on November 17-18. This year, the two-day conference went beyond batteries and focused on catalyzing collaboration to drive innovation among key players in energy storage. The summit brought together leading researchers and policymakers, pioneering companies and startups, as well as innovative... Read more

The Energy Storage & Distributed Resources Division (ESDR) announced the formation of the Thermal Energy Group earlier this month. ESDR now encompasses six groups spanning a diverse set of research areas ranging from energy conversion to grid integration, all of which are part of the Energy Technologies Area (ETA) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The group will be led... Read more

The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has appointed Noël Bakhtian, previously a senior policy adviser in the White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) and currently director of the Center for Advanced Energy Studies (CAES) at Idaho National Laboratory, as its inaugural director of the Berkeley Lab Energy Storage Center. Building on decades of... Read more

Hydrogen fuel cells are on the rise: Germany has rolled out hydrogen-powered trains, the San Francisco Bay Area will soon see the nation’s first hydrogen fuel cell ferry, and sales of fuel-cell vehicles are up globally. It’s a technology with the potential to provide a variety of clean energy options, especially in transportation.Now the Department of Energy has announced several major... Read more

The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) won three R&D 100 awards in the areas of higher energy efficiency in buildings, making lithium batteries safer and development of an innovative tool; all together the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) took home seven awards. For more than 50 years, the annual R&D 100 Awards have recognized 100 technologies of the... Read more

Methane is most commonly known as a ubiquitous cleaner energy source, while also being a potent greenhouse gas. It is produced from both natural sources, such as wetlands and large bodies of water, and anthropogenic sources, such as natural-gas reservoirs and livestock. At the same time, methane is a source of many important feedstock chemicals, including blue hydrogen and methanol, which is used... Read more

Prominent battery research has made great strides in advancing next-generation rechargeable batteries, which might use lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries, rather than the traditional Li-ion batteries commonly found in electric cars and mobile phones.Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have discovered a new type of polymer that can be used as a binder in a Li-S battery... Read more

Deep beneath the surface of the Salton Sea, a shallow lake in California’s Imperial County, sits an immense reserve of critical metals that, if unlocked, could power the state’s green economy for years to come. These naturally occurring metals are dissolved in geothermal brine, a byproduct of geothermal energy production. Now the race is on to develop technology to efficiently extract one of... Read more

Kristin Persson, a senior faculty scientist in the Energy Storage & Distributed Resources Division within the Energy Technologies Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and director of the Materials Project, has been named director of the Molecular Foundry. Her new appointment is effective August 15, 2020. She will continue to hold an appointment as a professor of... Read more

Robert Kostecki, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab), has been elected a vice president of the International Society of Electrochemistry, an organization that advances electrochemical science and technology. In his role on the executive committee, which extends from 2020 to 2022, Kostecki will focus on the society's regional sections.Kostecki is division director of... Read more

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Technology Commercialization Fund has awarded $1 million to four projects from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) to further collaborative research with industry partners on biofuels, bioproducts, energy microgrid technology, and renewable energy technology.Two of those projects are from Berkeley Lab’s Energy Technologies Area: Expand Access to... Read more

Marca Doeff, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab), recently won the election to become secretary of The Electrochemical Society (ECS), a member-led organization dedicated to advancing electrochemical and solid state science.Doeff has worked on materials for electrochromics, lithium and sodium polymer batteries, lithium ion batteries, solid-state lithium batteries and... Read more

A new type of device that has the potential to efficiently store vast amounts of energy has recently been effectively reconfigured and improved by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). This breakthrough could be a stepping-stone to helping our evolving power grid become more resilient.Renewable energy sources such as solar and wind are becoming increasingly... Read more

Materials Project Director Kristin Persson (Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt/Berkeley Lab)Kristin Persson is at the helm of a materials revolution.Since 2011, she has led the Materials Project, an open-access online database that virtually delivers the largest collection of materials properties to scientists from every corner of the globe who are searching for the next big thing in batteries, solar cells,... Read more

Ramamoorthy Ramesh, senior faculty scientist in the Materials Sciences Division of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and professor of physics and materials science & engineering at UC Berkeley, has been elected as a foreign member of the Royal Society for his “discoveries in complex oxides, from novel fundamental physics, through new... Read more

Berkeley Lab researchers (clockwise from top left) Kristin Persson, John Dagdelen, Gerbrand Ceder, and Amalie Trewartha led development of COVIDScholar, a text-mining tool for COVID-19-related scientific literature. (Credit: Berkeley Lab)A team of materials scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) — scientists who normally spend their time researching things like... Read more

With its high energy-to-weight ratio, hydrogen has great potential to be an efficient and clean fuel for cars, auxiliary power, stationary power generation and also as an energy storage medium. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researchers have been working with various methods of hydrogen production to produce cleaner and more efficient hydrogen for decades. New successful... Read more

Cheap, clean power generation is becoming more of a reality, but energy storage is still one of the biggest barriers to widespread adoption. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are continually working to advance technologies that generate, use, or store electricity at a large scale and for long duration (more than four hours). Electrochemical energy technologies... Read more

Two new videos highlighting ongoing collaboration and innovative research advancements promoting hydrogen as a large-scale renewable energy resource have recently been completed by a consortium of National Laboratories. Research Scientists from Berkeley Lab, along with Sandia National Laboratories, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Idaho National... Read more

Lithium ion is probably the most advanced technology available for the packs of rechargeable batteries you’ll buy this holiday season. The batteries also power the vast majority of consumer devices, electric vehicles, and grid storage systems.Despite their ubiquity, lithium-ion batteries have disadvantages. Metals used in the batteries are becoming expensive and one crucial metal, cobalt, is... Read more

Following an international search, Robert Kostecki has been appointed director of the Energy Storage and Distributed Resources (ESDR) Division in the Energy Technologies Area (ETA) at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).Kostecki has extensive leadership experience and is a renowned scientist known for his pioneering research in electrochemical systems... Read more

Cutting-edge technologies from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to detect radiation, make buildings more energy efficient, and accelerate neuroscience research were honored with R&D 100 Awards by R&D World magazine.Also recognized was Spack: A Package Manager for HPC Systems, a project led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and which includes the National Energy... Read more

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) have shown how chemical and structural changes improve the performance of a novel ion-conducting polymer (ionomer) membrane from 3M Company. The team included Ahmet Kusoglu, a research scientist in Berkeley Lab's Energy Conversion Group Using multiple x-ray characterization tools at the Advanced Light Source (ALS), the researchers took a... Read more