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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) Strategic Plan is the guiding force for our research and development for the next ten years. It clearly charts a path toward clean-energy solutions and focuses on five detailed Strategic Initiatives. The Plan provides an in-depth look at how ETA is accelerating research to provide affordable, clean energy to all while accomplishing deep, economy-wide decarbonization, looking to avoid a rise in global average temperature while simultaneously developing solutions to increase humanity's resilience to extreme weather volatility.
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About Us +
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.

A New View of Battery Technology

October 23, 2019

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) have developed a new infrared approach to probing the first few molecular layers of a liquid in contact with a graphene electrode under operating conditions.

The research, conducted at the Advanced Light Source (ALS), offers a new way to study the interfaces that are key to understanding batteries, corrosion, and other bio- and electrochemical phenomena.

Solid–liquid interfaces are vital to physical and chemical processes in many subjects, including corrosion, the generation and storage of energy (fuel cells, batteries), biology (ion transport through cell membranes), and environmental science (chemical weathering). However, solid–liquid interfaces are difficult to experiment on because they are buried under the bulk of the materials on either side of the interface. Furthermore, the interface region is extremely thin—only a few atomic layers. Many techniques for probing materials reveal just surface information, or, if they can penetrate more deeply, provide information averaged over a large volume, rather than from a thin slice close to an interface.

Now, researchers have demonstrated a way to overcome these challenges, using synchrotron infrared nanospectroscopy (SINS) at the ALS to collect infrared vibrational spectra at a graphene–electrolyte interface with nanoscale spatial resolution. The technique paves the way for nondestructive, in situ, and operando investigations of liquid environments and solid–liquid interfaces, particularly for applications in biology, energy storage and electrochemistry.

Read more about the research here: als.lbl.gov/infrared-nanospectroscopy-at-graphene-liquid-interfaces/