News

The White House has announced that Adam Weber has won a Presidential Early Career Award. Weber is a staff scientist at the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). His current research involves understanding and optimizing fuel-cell performance and lifetime; understanding flow batteries for grid-scale energy storage; and analysis of... Read more

In Scientific American magazine’s December 2013 issue, “World-changing ideas,” the cover story, “How supercomputers will yield a golden age of materials science,” sets the scene for the issue’s focus on practical innovations emerging from the laboratory.In the article, MIT’s Gerbrand Ceder and Environmental Energy Technologies Division scientist Kristin Persson describe the Materials... Read more

September Special Focus: CalChargeIn preparation for its mid-October launch, CalCharge and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have completed work on their innovative Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) that is expected to become a national model for industry engagement with the national laboratories.Energy storage innovators need cost-effective and clear... Read more

September Special Focus: CalChargeAfter nearly two years of research and organizational development efforts, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), CalCEF, and other key partners are only weeks away from the full operational launch of CalCharge. By mid-October, they expect to announce the core group of institutional and major corporate members along with the first tranche of... Read more

From a General Electric press release:It's a little more complex than making instant oatmeal, but scientists from GE and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) may have just the recipe for next-generation electric vehicle (EV) batteries that achieve desired driving range and cost for consumers.The GE/Berkeley Lab team is developing a water-based, flow battery capable of more than... Read more

Berkeley Lab battery researcher Gao Liu and his team earned a coveted R&D 100 Award this year for their invention of an electrically conductive rubbery adhesive that can be mixed with particles of silicon to form a battery's negative (-) electrode, or anode. Lithium-ion batteries whose anodes are built with this "conducting polymer binder" can have 30 percent more energy storage capacity than... Read more

Jeffery Reimer is a scientist in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, and UC Berkeley.Scientists would like to apply the same principles by which baking soda removes food odors from refrigerators or silica powder keeps moisture away from electronic devices to scrub carbon dioxide from the exhaust gases of fossil fuel power plants. An excellent candidate for this task is the class of... Read more

The energy density in lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries enables them to store and provide considerable energy in a small package. Powering devices from pacemakers to smart phones, these small, lightweight, rechargeable batteries have become a ubiquitous part of modern electronics. Using materials such as tin and silicon give Li-ion even a higher energy density—enough for a battery to power an... Read more

For 30 years or so, researchers in the Laser Spectroscopy and Applied Materials Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have been studying laser beams.Berkeley Lab's Rick Russo—a pioneer in the field—has been working with a technology called Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS), refining and expanding the technology for many applications. Famous for its use on Mars... Read more

A press release from CalCharge announcing the opportunity to partner with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on battery research:Beginning this month, the rapidly emerging California battery sector will have access to new resources to accelerate its growth: an opportunity to work alongside world-class scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). This opportunity is... Read more

NEC Laboratories America, Inc. has provided Michael Stadler of the Grid Integration Group a gift in the amount of $60,000 to support his research in microgrids and energy storage. Previous gifts from NEC have supported research resulting in a publication titled “Electric Storage in California’s Commercial Buildings,” LBNL-6071E. The research examines whether buildings could serve as the hub... Read more

CalCharge, a partnership of CalCEF and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has announced that it is teaming with San Jose State University to launch a battery university. Read the CalCharge press release at the link below.... Read more

In the quest to produce an environmentally benign renewable fuel, scientists have explored many techniques to split water molecules to produce hydrogen. Still, the current photovoltaic designs are not yet technically or economically viable. Materials research in this area has been promising, but research on the engineering design of these photoelectrochemical systems has been sparse.To advance... Read more

ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects – Energy) has announced 66 research grants to develop transformational energy technologies. Two projects were awarded to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researchers. Researchers from Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD) will also participate in a third project awarded to the University of California,... Read more

Vince Battaglia leads a behind-the-scenes tour of Berkeley Lab's BATT, the Batteries for Advanced Transportation Technologies Program he leads, where researchers aim to improve batteries upon which the range, efficiency, and power of tomorrow's electric cars will depend. This is the first in a forthcoming series of videos taking viewers into the laboratories and research facilities that members of... Read more

CalCEF, which creates innovative financial products for the clean energy economy, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) today announced a partnership to launch CalCharge, a consortium uniting California’s emerging and established battery technology companies with critical academic and government resources. By bringing together the dozens of battery companies and institutions... Read more

The Department of Defense’s Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP) recently announced the funding of 27 projects to demonstrate emerging energy technologies on military installations through its Installation Energy Test Bed initiative.Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD) and partner organizations were awarded two of... Read more

New materials are crucial to building a clean energy economy—for everything from batteries to photovoltaics to lighter weight vehicles—but today the development cycle is too slow: around 18 years from conception to commercialization. To speed up this process, a team of researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the Massachusetts... Read more

An antifogging coating technology developed by researchers in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at the Lawrence Berkeley national Laboratory has won a 2011 R&D 100 award. The developers of Nanostructured Antifogging Coating are EETD's Sam Mao, Vasileia Zormpa and Xiaobo Chen.The coating provides a durable, nontoxic, antifogging and self-cleaning coating for architectural glass,... Read more

Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere, in smart phones, laptops, an array of other consumer electronics, and the newest electric cars. Good as they are, they could be much better, especially when it comes to lowering the cost and extending the range of electric cars. To do that, batteries need to store a lot more energy. The anode is a critical component for storing energy in lithium-ion batteries.... Read more

A technology with the potential to increase the lithium-ion storage capacity of advanced batteries by eight times has been awarded a $240,000 grant from the University of California's Discovery proof-of-concept grant program to accelerate its entrance into the marketplace. This project is led by Gao Liu (Principal Investigator) and Vince Battaglia (co-PI) in the Environmental Energy Technologies... Read more

The Department of Energy has awarded up to $1.9 million to a research team led by EETD's Eric Masanet to develop "total cost of ownership" models for low- and high-temperature stationary fuel cell systems up to 250 kilowatts. The work will support research and development efforts for fuel cells by assessing the impact of state-of-the-art manufacturing technologies, system designs, and deployment... Read more

An antifogging coating technology developed by researchers in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has won a 2011 R&D 100 award. The developers of Nanostructured Antifogging Coating are EETD's Sam Mao, Vasileia Zormpa and Xiaobo Chen.The coating provides a durable, nontoxic, antifogging and self-cleaning coating for architectural glass,... Read more

Fuel cells as a power generator simply look too good to be true. They're quiet, they don't produce criteria pollutants, and they're efficient electricity producers. They can be placed right next to a building without adding miles of transmission lines, and they won't bother passers-by any more than a fire hydrant or a dumpster—less than a dumpster.But they're not the perfect power source, not... Read more

This article in The New York Times, "Building Better Batteries for Electric Cars," quotes Venkat Srinivasan, a scientist and blogger in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division here at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The story addresses ongoing research at Berkeley Lab, Argonne National Laboratory and elsewhere to develop batteries for transportation with increased power density.... Read more