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Energy Technologies Area (ETA) researchers are continually building on the strong scientific foundation we have developed over the past 50 years. We address the world’s most pressing climate challenges by bringing to market energy-efficient innovations across the buildings, transportation, and industrial sectors. ETA is at the forefront of developing better batteries for electric vehicles; improving the country's aging electrical grid and innovating distributed energy and storage solutions; developing grid-interactive, efficient buildings; and providing the most comprehensive market and data analysis worldwide for renewable technologies like wind and solar.
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The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) is unique in translating fundamental scientific discoveries into scalable technology adoption. Our approach combines an understanding of the marketplace and the role of state and federal regulation and policies. ETA's research drives real-world, practical results that affect and improve the everyday lives of Americans and those across the globe. Saving energy and battling the Climate Crisis are key to the foundation of our research, which is driven by technoeconomic analysis and in-lab experimentation and discovery.

$13 Million for EV Battery Research

November 8, 2021

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. The funding to Berkeley Lab is for a five-year period. Three of the five Berkeley Lab projects are to develop solid state lithium batteries, which have the potential to be safer and have much higher energy density than conventional lithium-ion batteries.

“This is very promising. It’s an enormously important path for the energy storage industry because solid state batteries are both safer – they don’t have highly flammable liquid electrolytes, like today’s lithium-ion batteries do – and will lead to higher energy density,” said Berkeley Lab battery scientist Gerbrand Ceder, the lead scientist on one of the projects. “With conventional lithium-ion batteries we don’t have much of a path left to higher energy density because it’s already almost fully optimized.”

With the new funding Berkeley Lab scientists will investigate better and longer-lasting electrolytes for solid state batteries and new ways to manufacture them. “Making solid state batteries is considerably different from the way lithium-ion batteries are made today,” Ceder said.

Read the full story at Berkeley Lab News Center: newscenter.lbl.gov/2021/11/08/berkeley-lab-awarded-more-than-13m-for-electric-vehicle-battery-research/