President Obama visits a battery-research lab in suburban Chicago to announce a $2 billion plan to boost battery and transportation research. Scientists at the lab are in pursuit of a battery that cave a profound effect on how we power our gadgets, cars, and homes.
The campus of Argonne National Laboratory is the site of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, a federally-funded battery-research effort. President Obama visits the lab Friday and is expected to discuss the role storage and renewables will play in America's energy future.
Courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory/File
EnlargePresident Obama's visit to the center of a national energy-storage-research effort Friday highlights an overlooked tool in the administration's push for renewable energy: batteries.
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The technology is ubiquitous ? in our phones, our cars, and our planes ? but the science is far from simple. The challenges are well-documented in news stories about bankrupt batterymakers, winter-averse electric cars, and grounded Dreamliners.
Many in the energy community believe we need a better battery. That's the focus of the work under way at the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) at Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago ? and the reason for Mr. Obama's visit. The president is expected to urge Congress to provide an additional $2 billion for battery and transportation research meant to end the nation's use of oil. Better batteries would not only extend the range of electric-only and hybrid cars, they would also make the nation's electric grid a lot "greener," capable of storing energy from wind turbines and solar panels?on a large scale and then delivering it when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.
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"It?s not glitzy; it?s not glamorous," said?Donald Sadoway, a battery researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Mass., in?a phone interview. "But ? boy ? if this thing works, it has enormous benefit."?
How hard can it be?
In its simplest form, storing energy is like pushing a boulder uphill. The physical effort is stored in the boulder as potential energy. When it rolls back downhill, this "battery" is "discharged."
The challenges are comparably Sisyphean in advanced energy storage. As the president will likely see on his tour of the lab Friday, researchers at Argonne are trying to?pack boulder-sized energy into smaller and smaller packages.
"[W]e're moving mass around," explained Kevin Gallagher, an electrochemical engineer with JCESR (pronounced "jay - caesar"). "It's not just moving electrons or photons. That would happen in telecommunications or in a computer chip," ?he said in an interview at Argonne last month.?"We're moving mass."
In the case of a lithium-ion batteries ? the kind used in most of our electronics ? it's an ion that passes to and from anode to cathode, through an electrolyte. Depending on the direction, that process either stores energy or releases it.
?Whether you know it or not, every time you plug in your phone or laptop, you are reversing a chemical reaction," said Jeff Chamberlain, deputy director of development and demonstration at JCESR, in a telephone interview. "To make a good battery, you want to make the chemical reaction reversible, thousands of times. It?s just not easy.?
The challenge is that this process generates heat and shortens the life span of the battery. Sometimes it generates too much heat, as was the case with the smoldering batteries in the now-grounded Boeing 787 Dreamliners.
Advanced batteries are also expensive. It will take a lot of work before they come close to competing with the price points of gasoline.
But the payoffs of doing so would be significant ? for both the electrical grid and our transportation network.
Internal combustion is a one-way street. After you spend the gas in your car's tank, you don't get that energy back. You go and get more gas.
The energy generated in electrochemistry, however, is renewable.
"That?s really important," Mr. Chamberlain said, "because now I can plug my car into my wall and put 'fuel' back in my car. Think about the implications about that in terms of a new green society.?
Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/r7bDp10N6is/Obama-at-Argonne-lab-Why-batteries-matter
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