Next Generation Energy Storage: Beyond Lithium Ion | George Crabtree, Argonne National Laboratory

my topic is storage on the grid and for cars I thought I would talk at a fairly high level kind of introductory but provocative and make you think about some things that maybe you haven't thought about we actually do use computing rather fundamentally in ways that it hasn't been used before and I will spend a little time on that and I think I'm not going to get very technical about energy store a little bit but not much about what we're actually doing so let me because I'm not going to do that start by saying this thing which we pronounce you have to have an acronym you pronounce otherwise you don't exist so that is pronounced J Caesar and the idea is to you know strike aw into the minds of our competitors but easy to remember so we we are two and a half years old we it's a five-year contract with do e it's in the office of science actually basic energy sciences and the idea is to develop next-generation storage so you guys all know about lithium-ion that's what does everything in the world including these things and but it's not good enough for cars in spite of the fact that Tesla and others do use it in cars the drawback is Tesla's pretty expensive and in fact the least expensive electric car you can buy is still a lot more than the least expensive gasoline car so apart from driving my Tesla because I like the way it feels or I like to show off or I like the you know kind of open blue sky over my head uh you if you really want to have an impact on transportation you have to displace the cheap cars you need a mass-market car so you need a $20,000 car and we're pretty far away from that the other application is the grid so there's almost no electrical storage on the grid now there is some pumped hydro that's what most of it is and there's only 2% of the storage capacity about 2% of what we can generate so it's almost nothing and that's pumped hydro but there are lots of reasons why you would want to have storage on the grid and these beautiful lithium-ion batteries are just too expensive for that so we have two goals we want to get a little tiny battery it's actually bigger than this but this you know gets the point across that drives you 200 or 300 miles and doesn't cost much that's the first challenge and the second challenge for the grid is it can be bigger because we'll probably put it in a shed somewhere and control the temperature doesn't have to work it zero degrees like your car does but it has to be cheap for the grid so those are the two challenges so they were Department of Energy was very innovative there are and they in fact named what we are an energy innovation hub there's four of them they're funded in very generous levels get twenty five million dollars a year for five years and we could be renewed for a second five years we're halfway through the first five years so it's a little too soon to talk about that but the idea is that we could do something different so I'm going to spend most of the time telling you about what we do different and why we think it'll work I won't spend any time let you ask me you could ask the potentially embarrassing question so what have you done in two and a half years and because I have to have an answer to it I do have an answer to it to not be happy to explain that but I but that's that's for the QA so okay let's launch Oh first of all if you want to know more here's our webpage it's stuff on it changes all the time we have a couple of web administrators that really look after well and uh uh so it's kind like browsing the New York Times take a look at that this is a review article that now's a little bit out of date uh because it's mostly on what we do last year but there's a URL for it if you're a serious person you can read that itself is not very technical it's mostly high-level stuff so this is what we all know right lithium-ion batteries they enabled this personal electronics revolution and they came out in 1991 they started kind of Sony brought him out of course it would be a Japanese company that had lots of personal electronic electronics to power that's the reason they wanted it it was about twice as good in performance as the as the battery the best battery in 1991 which was nickel metal hydride or nickel cadmium so this had twice the energy density which means you could make it half as big and power the same stuff and it started kind of modestly maybe music players and camcorders but take a look at what we have now so my cell phone I never make a call on it I use it to check the web I text I do every other possible I see when is the CTA gonna come or the bus do every possible thing and honestly hardly ever use it for a phone call but wow it's it and tablets and laptops and now watches have really changed the way that we interact with people and with information so when I read a scientific article I've got now Google right next to me if I don't understand this sentence I google the sentence I read Wikipedia my favorite source and I get it and then I go back to reading so I mean I it has really changed it's also forced us to quit writing so nobody can write anymore we can all type but we can't write well that's the sign of the times anyway these things are wonderful and lithium-ion batteries made this possible they've gotten a lot better since 1991 so they're about a factor of 10 cheaper than they were in 1991 and they're about a factor of three more powerful so the energy density is about a factor of three higher so if you take the factor of two that they were better than nickel cadmium when they came out at 91 and now the factor of three since 91 now you're talking a factor of six better in perform it's and that's starting to make a huge difference it's still a problem with battery so if you look at your Mac this is a sort of an x-ray picture and you can see most of its battery the logic board takes up no space at all those things are nano scale so you can get all the logic you want in there and here's the trackpad but so yeah but it's mostly battery so I this is the old version of the Samsung cell phone and I just updated to a newer one which has a bigger screen and they were selling it to me saying well the keyboard will be bigger your fingers won't get in the way you know you want to have fat fingers and you can see things and so I think the real reason is they need more space for the battery as you can you can put all kinds of apps on the cell phone that you know you just don't have the power to to to run so it's still the limitation so if there if we make a better battery for cars in the grid it will probably spill over into this 20k electric car and you need grid scale electric electricity storage here's some of the reasons why you could imagine you want to put wind and solar out there they're variable and you have to back them up with something rather than waste the excess electricity and when you don't have enough turn on the gas plant which is right next to the wind farm doesn't really make sense you'd rather store the excess and withdraw it later right now it's a little too expensive so a battery over the life of the battery if you store it and you know release it and so on it costs about to get a certain amount of energy out cost about five times more than it does to build a gas plant over the life of the gas plant so that's the competition that batteries face and that's one of our targets make it a factor of five better so here's the two things that we're going after we're not there yet uh interesting question oh here's all the energy we used in 2013 in the US and the two biggest sectors are colored the grid took almost 40 percent of all our energy is electrons in wires and 28 percent is gasoline in your tank and these two things make about two-thirds of all the energy we use so on this scale personal electronics is 2% if you channeled half of the energy through storage that would be ten times more than the energy that is put out by lithium-ion batteries and just as another factoid reference point lithium-ion batteries are now about a 15 to 20 billion dollar market so we're talking about a market that at least in energy terms could be ten times bigger than that so it's really interesting from a business point of view maybe we should try to do this this is Jay Caesar at the very high level one slide everything here's our vision transform transportation and the electricity grid with high-performance low-cost energy electricity storage that's what we'd like that's that's going to take you know decade maybe two decades to really do we have a mission this is much more immediate we want to deliver within five years and we only say five years because that's a link to the contract we did not pick five years we were told you can apply for this five-year grant okay will look like work so but we want to have some transformational outcomes so prototypes not batteries but prototypes that if they were scaled up to manufacturing would be have five times the energy density of lithium-ion batteries and cost one-fifth so the cost one-fifth that's for the grid five times the energy density that's for the car although they both interact with each other in both cases but that's that's the basic breakdown so that's aggressive and that is I don't know you may call it aspirational we're shooting high but we know from experience if you don't shoot high you know you don't get very far uh can we do it in five years I don't know maybe not we're halfway there we have some light at the end of the tunnel that we think maybe we can and if it takes longer well maybe we'll get renewed so so we want to achieve that we want to leave three things behind three legacies and we'll use those legacies to actually achieve our goal here's the first one library a fundamental science of the materials and phenomena of energy storage it means electricity storage at atomic and molecular levels so we've had maybe 15 years of nanoscience or at least the word nanoscience and this honestly has not been applied to electricity storage anywhere near the level that it should be or could be so let's actually understand at this atomic and molecular level what happens and we want to do that for two reasons because we feel if we really understand how these things work we can identify the next material that we'll need for the next generation battery much more quickly and effectively because we kind of know what we're looking for and once we identify we can get the most performance out of it again because we know what we're looking for so we think this is basic then the next thing we'd like to leave behind are these two prototypes and they'll probably look really different so the car will be a small thing you put under the hood the grid thing will be big but they may be based on this same set of fundamental knowledge that we developed in legacy one that's in common and the third thing may turn out to be the most important thing a new paradigm for battery Rd so the way the battery community now work I'm in a research group at a university I find a material that might be a cathode the next-generation cathode and I publish it I'm done somebody has to come along somewhere else maybe in a company a startup company or another engineering department and say I think I can make a cathode out of that and I'll try to make a catheter he's done then the next group comes along and says well I think I can make it make a battery with your cathode but I have to combine it with an electrolyte with an anode and maybe I can do this integration and that's a third group these groups don't usually talk to each other very much they communicate through the literature and they have different motivations I'm a scientist I want to my discovery I want to publish my paper in nature give me ten nature papers and you know I'm good for five years that is that is not the way technology works they want to bring out a product and they you know they just have different motivations so we want to combine four things they're listed here four things in one organization so it's discovery science battery design research prototyping of four batteries and manufacturing collaboration we're not going to manufacture we don't know how to do it and we don't have enough money and so on other people do it better but we'll talk to the manufacturers and that's really really important so here is the yeah oh sorry this my question doesn't really affect the legacies because yeah without even without that the legacies or really transformational but do you think the your vision is enough do you think 5x is enough don't you think there needs to be a disruptive technology to to displace this place oil and gas yeah absolutely do you think that you need at least 10 X so what a great question so you might say why stop at 10 so there's one reason there's two reasons for that one reason is we don't know if material we don't know that there exists materials that will be better than a factor of 10 so I can think of several cases and the whole community does this all the time on the back of an envelope I just say let me take lithium and oxygen and you know here's the reactivity and so on looks like it's a factor of 10 so a factor of 5 is about half theoretical in that case and that's thought to be achievable you can do half the other so one reason is there may not be materials that can do better than on the ground a factor of five theoretically a factor of ten the other reason is that if we shoot too far in the future or beyond where we are we don't know how to get there and I'm going to show you some slides that indicate how we think we're going to get there with this factor of five uh that could be the in principle the platform for another factor of five later on but maybe we're just modest ad work and we're only I mean this is in fact this is in fact transformational so if you could get these factors of five you would pretty much have you know 30% electric cars and you would have grid storage everywhere so this would already be a big question factors aside because of the cost yeah it's two factors of five but they are related so if I make a battery that's five times smaller with the same energy density then I don't need as many materials and you might say I automatically get a factor of five in cost I mean the back of the envelope but they are definitely additive yeah so another yeah sorry environmental impact of these masteries could it be that once you build a large battery for storing electricity would actually be better for Munro mental point of you to use the gas power plant instead of storing the electricity in the battery so there are studies of that so we don't know for the batteries we're making which are next generation I mean we don't know what they are so you can't say what the environmental impact is of making them but for lithium-ion batteries it's really clear that for example making a lithium-ion battery that would replace a coal-fired power plant you're better off at the battery so certainly from an emissions point of view if these things enable wind and solar to be widely deployed let's say at the 20 or 30 percent level instead of the 4 percent level where they are now that's a big win environmentally and the batteries that we know of now and we could expect X next generation batteries won't be much different that no it's kind of a no-brainer it for that you can think of other environmental impacts and indeed so the lithium-ion battery has expensive cobalt in it it has organic electrolytes which can catch fire as Tesla and Boeing found out and you know there's there are impact what if they leak out and so on and you have to take those things into account actually we do we think I'll show you in a minute all the materials we're looking at and we tend to look at only those things that I have a certain level of safety so we don't go with the things that might work rate but are clearly unsafe just don't just no just don't go there but that is a very very important question before I go back to my slides I've got yeah standing consideration improving the lifetime if you double the lifetime you cut the cost in half so absolutely and one of the questions the Lithium Ion community faces and we face too is why does it go bad and I'll show you in an animation you know lithium ions are moving from anode to cathode at cathode to anode so they have to go in they go out thinks well they shrink eventually they fracture and the electrode itself just has a thousand cycles in it or six thousand cycles in it and it just degrades and so can you double that life time why not if you really understand things at the atomic and molecular level and if you maybe take a big block of electrode that's this big and has to expand to this big and you shrink it down to ten nanometers it can actually be flexible enough to shrink and grow and not fracture so there are ways to think about that for sure so here's our paradigm here's the four things you see here in the red this is a discovery science part three labels which I'll tell you about in a minute never mind what they are but those are three concepts that we're following and we could apply those concepts show you in a minute a battery has a cathode and anode an electrolyte we can apply these concepts at the cathode or at the anode so it's really nine different kinds of batteries here three times three lots of cross-cutting science we do battery design and so on we bring some special tools and one of the tools we bring is computation being used in a new way so here's a thing on the discovery side side materials project and electrolyte genome so the idea of a materials genome that's the you know vernacular is that I'm looking for a new cathode I have some ideas about what might be a good new cathode instead of making those things in the laboratory I'll simulate them on a computer and with a computer I can do it so fast I in a sense go crazy I can simulate 10,000 different cathodes that I think might work then I look at them all on paper or on the screen and I choose maybe 10 or 20 that really look promising and I throw the others out so ah that idea has been around predates JC ZURB I know five or six or seven or eight years and people have applied it to battery electrodes as we do but we've taken it a step further we've probably done more and we have the infrastructure computational infrastructure and databases and so on to really do it you know an industrial scale so uh that's for crystalline electrodes and you use things like density functional theory and so on it's it's a perfect crystal and I want to know all the electronics come but you know structure properties I want to know how fast lithium goes in and comes out and I'll show you in a minute why that's important those things can be calculated we added another feature and that's the second screen you see there the electrolyte genome so every battery has a liquid electrolyte in which the lithium ions dissolve and going from anode to cathode lots of organic electrolytes around molecules it could be electrolytes that simply are not used and are too complicated nobody knows what they are we tend to concentrate on maybe 15 different electrolytes organic electrolytes and just ignore the rest why don't we look at those things so we have now done the same thing for liquids it's a different kind of calculation you worry about different properties and we've taken it to the extreme we just completed after two and a half years a catalogue of 16,000 organic molecules that could be used for electrolytes and now we have the challenge of sifting through all that stuff we've sifted through some of it but there's a it's a goldmine so we simulate before we make in the lab it changes it saves enormous amounts of time and it lets you pinpoint you hope the things that are going to work and throw away all the things that won't work so it's one way in which we use computers second thing we have is quite experimental so in a battery or in any electrochemical device it's the interface between the crystalline electrode and the liquid electrolyte that counts that's where all the electrochemistry takes place that's where the energy storage and releasing takes place so we we can synthesize those interfaces we can use state-of-the-art tools x-rays infrared scanning tunneling microscopes all kinds of things to study what happens at that interface so this is critical actually and I believe to our knowledge it's the best well it competes with the best in the world then we use another computation in another way very similar to the way that we use it for materials except here the object is the whole battery so I'll show you in a minute it's anode electrolyte cathode how do they work together and you find Bickley in most cases they don't work together you know you have to look for the cases where they work together so we look for those cases and we project if I were to scale up this idea to a manufactured battery what would it cost so that's one of our two fives what would it cost would it be a factor of five less than now and how would it perform would it perform a factor five better than today's batteries so we can again ask these questions on the computer before we actually make the battery that saves an enormous amount of time and we hope trashes 80% of the things that we would like to make that we've this techno-economic modelling tells us probably won't work and we'll concentrate on the ones that do so this is a second way in which we use computation we also have in when organizing our research a thing called Sprint's so almost every prototype has maybe five critical questions you have to answer yes to these five if that's going to work we'll take the top question the most important one will formulate the question a very precise way so it's limited will form a team so we have 25 million dollars a year we have 14 institutions that are part of JC's er we have maybe 160 researchers at those institutions including postdocs and graduate students we'll take a team of maybe 5 to 15 tailored the team is tailored to answer that question and we'll give them maybe two months or up to six months give me an answer if it's yes we'll go on to the next question if it's no at least in principle we'll trash that idea or we'll try something else so it turns out this is a very very good way to to punctuate the research and structure it everyone knows what they're doing and I will tell you this audience may like this better than then Paul will that the Sprint's that are led by early career people including postdocs usually do better than the ones that are led by senior people because the early career folks are really engaged that's pretty much all they're doing at least for that six months whereas the senior people I've got a hundred things on their mind and I'll get around to the sprint you know maybe tomorrow and it goes slower so it's a great leadership experience because the sprint is over so if it worked great you you feel good if it didn't work so good it doesn't hang over your head for the rest of your life you you know you move on to the next thing and you try again so it's really quite a nice thing okay so how does a battery work and this is the thing that will yeah good that will sort of explain why we're doing what we're doing so here's the battery there's an anode over here it's usually graphite for lithium ions graphite there's a liquid organic electrolyte here there's an interface layer that appears because the electrolyte reacts with the graphite and makes this layer on the other side there's a cathode which is also layered for lithium ion batteries it's typically a metal oxide so cobalt oxide dioxide it also has an interface layer from reactions and we're now looking at the charging stage so the lithium's are stored in sorry in the cathode when it's discharged to charge it you put on a voltage and drive them over to the anode they exist in between the layers of the graphite so that's called intercalation and so if you're discharging a singly charged lithium ion leaves the intercalation host graphite goes through this layer you see the plus sign it acquires a solvation shell of the polarizable organic molecules so they're neutral but they can be polarized so they you know get a dipole and the minus side points in toward the the lithium and it goes over to the cathode and so this thing just goes back and forth so sometimes it's called a rocking-chair battery so the lithium ions are in the cathode they're in the anode they're in the cathode they're in the anode it's storing energy it's releasing energy just goes back and forth and this was the great advance of 1991 so what are we going to do to do something better than lithium ion so here they are as I said there were three things so there's a lithium ion battery first thing we are going to look at is lithium has one charge on it so why don't I use magnesium which has two charges calcium has two charges zinc has two charges aluminum has three charges so at least in principle order of magnitude I doubled or tripled the energy stored with each cycle of that magnesium compared to lithium so great idea this idea has been around not ours not original with us the trouble with the idea is that none of the anodes cathodes or electrolytes that work for lithium also work for magnesium so you have to discover three new materials that are compatible with magnesium but in principle a very good idea second idea is get rid of intercalation you may have noticed that even when there's no lithium in the anode in the graphite the graphite is still there it's taking up space and away something so I can make the energy density of the battery higher if I didn't have this host got a neutral you know non active host sitting around okay so I'll have a pure lithium metal anode and I'll have sulfur as the cathode and when the lithium goes across to the sulfur it makes a chemical reaction a covalent chemical bond and you can store a lot more energy in a you know high-energy covalent chemical bond than you can in intercalation so this is where you get the estimates of factors of 10 if that were oxygen for example and similar for for sulfur trouble sulfur's and insulator the LI 2s which forms with lithium is also an insulator so it's pretty hard to make it go backwards you can't access these insulators electronically you could do it with temperature but you don't want to be heating the thing up so there are ways around that but that's that's the basic challenge third idea get rid of the crystalline electrodes altogether so make them a liquid so make it either a solution of ions in solution or make it a suspension of nanoparticles floating in the liquid why do you want to do that well first of all you can scale that up to the size you need for the grid rather easily you just make the liquid takes as big as you need to make them and the idea is the of the flow batteries this is called is there's a reactor here the the active ions on one side react with the active ions on the other in exchange no form chemical reactions and exchange energy and the electrons go through the external circuit so this part stays the same and the tanks grow so another reason we like this typically these batteries are around they're made with vanadium or some transition metal but you can make them with organics and organics are things of course like hydrogen no carbon nitrogen oxygen stuff that's cheap that's abundant that at least in principle if you recycle it back to elemental form is harmless to the environment and the the prospect of doing this on a big scale really cheaply and recycling everything is pretty appealing so those are the three ideas and I want to yes the two on the right side of course and use some reactive thing some reaction of a metal that melts or solidify absolutely so you can have a lithium metal anode so that's crystalline and you could have a fluid electrode which might be something that contains sulfur in solution for example so you can certainly combine you can combine this would also I could have a magnesium metal anode instead of this intercalation Andrea and maybe have an intercalation cathode so the nice thing about this is precisely what you're saying it looks like three ideas it's nine ideas because every one of them can be done at the anode or the cathode yeah so I'm gonna go suggestion that everything it's hard with the traditional batteries to scale them up why is that just because so I'll give you an example Tesla uses Panasonic computer batteries 7,000 of them so the way he scales up is just if you open it up there's 7,000 little tiny cells this big in there and that's because it's hard to scale up so once you figure out how to make it you really don't want to retool everything to do that same process at say a hundred times scale and is there some sort of like chemical well in a way yes so right now everything is done with thin films and I was mentioning earlier that the reason batteries fail is the lithium has to go in and out of the anode and cathode if it's a big thing the shrinkage and the and the growth gets to be a real problem if it's a thin film then you can better live with it so it sometimes just making something ten times bigger makes it impossible to do by the same techniques so yeah good question so I this is now really important and it's kind of the last important thing I'm going to say but I want to compare lithium ion with beyond lithium ion so I've got two axes here systems and by that I mean what's the concept for lithium ion its intercalation at the anode it's intercalation at the cathode it's really simple it's one concept at both electrodes and here I've got materials well almost every lithium ion battery has a graphite anode ninety percent of them have a cobalt oxide cathode but you can talk about other cathodes and other electrolytes and there might be twenty much bub probably between five and ten different materials that you used to make lithium ion it's been around since 1991 so we know a lot about it it's already gotten a lot better I was saying a factor of three in performance and the factor of ten in cost since 91 there's still improvements you can make but they're incremental you will not get the transformational factors of five that we want from lithium ion you can on a back of an envelope you can just prove to yourself right away it won't work here's beyond lithium-ion it's a way way way bigger space we were saying that there are three ideas you apply at the anode or the cathode the electrolyte could be liquid it could be solid so there's two eighteen different ways to conceptualize the beyond lithium-ion battery compared to one for looking at my own if you look at the materials as maybe 30 or 40 different materials that are being considered to implement those eighteen ideas which means that you can make a lot of batteries in this space so very conservatively I wrote there fifty to a hundred I gave this showed this slide at a meeting and one of our JC's our members in fact was in the audience he said ah that's wrong it's not fifty two hundred five hundred to a thousand and maybe it is but let's be conservative I'd say it's fifty to a hundred when you're faced with a space this big you cannot be Thomas Edison so you can't say well I'll try the first one if that doesn't work I try the second one and no two percent inspiration and 98 percent perspiration I'll eventually get sore well you probably won't so and I didn't mention this but the history of lithium-ion is that most things don't work the simple elegant idea is perfect like all these three ideas I was showing you and when you go to do it you realize oh there's five things that I thought might go wrong and every one of them goes wrong and then there's five more that I didn't even think of it they also go wrong so what you're faced with is overcoming a series of problems that you you know side-effects that you have to fix and that usually defeats most things well it didn't defeat lithium-ion that's good and there's some solutions in this space that it won't defeat but what I was saying earlier faced with this big space you have to trash 80% of it at the beginning and go after the 20% that looks like it might work we do that through partly through computation so we look at the materials and we look at the battery systems and we analyze them rather deeply before we ever start to make them and we can then start with the ones that look let's say the most promising so I'll say one more that's not as important as what I just said but sort of important so what kind of a battery are we going to make we had our first review eight months after we launched it was a serious review with seven outside reviewers and our deal we program managers and so on and one of the reviewers asked or said oh you're making a prototype so you'll put it under the hood of a Chevy Volt you'll drive it around for a couple of months to see if it works and we said no that's not what we're going to do too expensive and just too big a job for us we'll make a prototype that I can hold in my hand it might look kind of messy it may have wires hanging off like this it might be a little more polished and packaged like the thing above it but it will be small we'll use our tech our data from this phototype and techno economic modeling to predict how would it behave if we scaled it up and will hope to interest a manufacturer such as Johnson Controls which happens to be the biggest manufacturer of lead acid batteries and remarkably they've been around for a hundred years they've still start everyone's car it's a big business for them but they would like to get in on the next part of the business too so we talked to them quite frequently and we asked them what what kind of a prototype do we have to make to interest you in making say a thing like that which is the battery of a Chevy Volt you know that you could put under the hood of a bolt drive around see if it works and the argument we have with them is they say make it big and we say can't make it big so we argue back and forth about how big is big enough and we each to you know I'll call it a happy medium it's at least a medium and and and we've realized that they're sort of product prototypes start from here and get bigger and no more complex we start from here and our top level research prototypes overlap about two rungs of the ladder so the last time we were up there which was earlier this spring we agreed that when we get close to those two rungs that overlap we'll start working with them and they can tell us you know this is never going to scale forget it or don't use this material it's you know you can't make enough of it or whatever and this kind of advice is really really helpful because most scientists never think about how would I commercialize this they just say here's an interesting discovery and and when you look at the whole chain you could really save a lot of time so I think that's the last thing I'm going to say and yeah thank you oh here's a question or libraries and abuse or simulation a lot so there's well for the electrodes it's a lot of density functional theory so we want to know the electronic structure is it stable so I've got a compound that I think would be great can you even make it you know is it stable and we'd like to know if it's an intercalation you want to put let's say magnesium and it will magnesium go into it now is it stable with magnesium in it if I put one percent magnesium or a hundred percent magnesium is there a phase transition to some other crystalline phase which we actually don't want so we'd like to find something that has just one phase like graphite does and you put as much stuff in between as your life questions like that for the liquid you want to simulate liquid behavior and that's more molecular dynamics so you want to you have all these you know you have let's say hundreds or thousands of molecules all the same but you want to let them interact and you need an interaction potential which you get from someplace and you can probably refine by experiment and once you get that interaction potential then at least in principle you can calculate what or simulate what that liquid would do if there were a positively charged I'd say magnesium ion there so it's a variety of things and I think the advantage of what we do is that with the team we have in the 14 institutions and so on we can actually cover every phenomena that occurs in a battery a research group would never be able to do that even one institution would have trouble toyota could do it GM could do it but they're not many and so we bring this you know the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts idea do you want to so I have a couple of questions the first question is just get your pants on now say like in five ten years time if you went the goal of thirty percent of cars the panthéon electric what impact would that have on like with lithium or whatever the material is the battery would that become the next oil yeah I mean I'm deciding to recycle these things it's not like I thought you just buzz me but have people thought about that like you know where where does this lithium come from what's the energy security aspect of it yeah that's a great question and people have thought about it so a lot of it comes from South America lithium and I think there's enough lithium around right now not talking about 30-percent car penetration but right now that you don't worry too much about finding the rest of it which is somewhere uh but careful studies have shown and people have done this especially for lithium ion batteries because we know everything about them you can recycle them you Marlys have to recycle them because if you threw away the lithium every time no the battery went bad there wouldn't be enough lithium but if you do recycle as you said then you can make it live and even with 30% penetration to the best you can estimate it works but you do have to recycle for sure so my second question is then again related to 30% penetration what impact would that have on there like this in a pinch because of the greatest probably like decades all right and it's designed to protect itself so if everyone were to plug in the Chevy Volt or the new small car that comes out won't degrade just shut down and I know people are studying this is just a gauge of dawn so yeah so it depends on what time of day everyone plugs it in at the same time if it's 6:00 in the afternoon the grids did if it's 2:00 in the morning vicar it's fine it turns out you can there are studies of this that 70% penetration of electric cars could easily be charged with the excess capacity on the grid mostly at night if everybody chose to charge at night which you know maybe they would I mean that's not unreasonable so the and it's a fascinating question the regulators tell the grid operators don't let the electricity go off ever if you let it go off we're going to really make it painful for you and this lesson has been learned very well over many decades so they build everything for the peak they have no choice and said you can't store electricity you have to use it at the same rate you produce it if there's a really high demand they can meet that demand and that means they actually there's plenty of excess to charge cars if you do it intelligently about French we use all carbon emissions by 50% and shutting down coil so you see the phone call saying well so the climate is a whole nother wonderful can of worms and but it's quite clear that people who have thought about this and it doesn't take you very long to come to this conclusion it's not no rocket science but certainly if you have wind and solar on the grid instead of coal you're way better off for climate and for carbon emissions you can't really put we have about 4% wind and solar on the US grid now if it were 30% which is you know one of the goals through here actually California and New York one 50% renewable electricity so if you have all these generation sources around you have to have storage and you hear Terry Boston is the CEO of PJM which is the the ISO as it's called it does know England and Chicago and in his talk he has a slide that shows wind and solar stuff and he says if you like wind and solar you're going to love storage so you you really have to have it does it make us it makes us feel good I think it means you know maybe we'll be around we storage guys we'll be around for the next 20 or 30 years because the problem will not be solved very fast you

Channel: Argonne National Laboratory Training

Views: 113,645

Rating: 4.7193875 out of 5

Keywords: Computing, Argonne National Laboratory, ANL, supercomputing, high-performance computing, leadership-class computing, DOE LCF, DOE leadership computing, HPC, exascale computing, scientific computing, George Crabtree, Lithium Ion, next-generation energy storage, energy storage

Id: DnE-44Ub0Ag

Length: 46min 7sec (2767 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/xfjqvyks]

George Crabtree gives a talk on the research going into finding storage solutions beyond Lithium for both individual and city level applications ad discusses interesting techniques such as computational material design and working with manufactures to help focus on options with realistic chances of going from the lab to mass production applications. It's a really good talk