DOE aims to overcome energy-storage challenges
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DOE aims to overcome energystorage challenges http://energy.gov/hubs
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ver the next five years, the US Department of Energy (DOE) will invest up to $120 million in a new largescale, collaborative effort to accelerate the pace of energy-storage research and development. Focused on the areas of transportation and the electrical grid, DOE is establishing an Energy Innovation Hub for Batteries and Energy Storage in fiscal year 2012. The hub will be a center for multidisciplinary research and engineering aimed at overcoming the technological barriers to progress in energy storage, many of which are deeply rooted in materials chemistry and structure. The selection of institutions for this hub will be made later this year. “The Batteries and Energy Storage Hub will pursue cutting-edge research to improve electrochemical energystorage technology, as well as explore entirely new materials, architectures, and approaches for transportation and utility-scale storage,” said Linda Horton, director of the Materials Science and Engineering Division within the DOE Basic Energy Sciences program. Hubs are composed of teams of scientists and engineers from many disciplines that work together under one roof
toward a specific end, modeled in part after highly collaborative programs such as the Manhattan Project and AT&T Bell Laboratories. Energy Innovation Hubs support high-risk, high-reward research and development efforts in critical energy areas, in order to lower the risk enough for private industry to take over. The Batteries and Energy-Storage Hub will be managed by the DOE Basic Energy Sciences (BES) program in close cooperation with relevant DOE technology offices, and will be funded at a level of $20 million for fiscal year 2012. BES will award the Hub based on a peer review of applications that are currently being developed by a lead institution, or set of institutions. The Batteries and Energy-Storage Hub applications will propose the infrastructure, management structure, and research goals, and will define how the hub will create a culture of innovation. Although specific priorities will be defined by the lead institution, overarching challenges include improving the lifetime and range of vehicle batteries and better integrating renewable energy sources into the electric grid. The characterization, creation, and control of materials will play a key role in meeting these challenges, as discussed in the report Basic Research Needs for Electrical Energy Storage (EES), based on a 2007 BES workshop. “Revolutionary breakthroughs in EES have been singled out as perhaps the most crucial need for this nation’s secure energy fuActaCell, a US-based corporation formed in 2007 by ture,” reads the report. “Recent exclusively licensing Li-Ion technologies developed at the University of Texas at Austin Material advances have provided the abilSciences Program, created a Power Cell that is 3.5 ity to synthesize novel nanoscale times more powerful than the battery used in the Toyota Prius. materials with architectures tailored for specific
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