T. Ellis, C. Greco, A. McQuilling, R. Miksad, M. Raiford, E. Thomsen, T. Fister, K. Knehr, A. Stack, D. Wu, X. Ma
Consortium for Battery Innovation,
United States
Keywords: lead-acid battery, energy storage, collaboration, Grid Storage Launchpad, Advanced Photon Source
Summary:
The Consortium for Lead Battery Leadership (CLBL) brings together Battery Council International, the Consortium for Battery Innovation, eight U.S. lead battery manufacturers, and three national laboratories to conduct pre-competitive research aimed at improving lead battery performance and reduce their cost for energy storage deployment. This project leverages long-standing collaborative relationships to build a durable partnership among competitors and utilize the unique capabilities of Oak Ridge (ORNL), Argonne (ANL) and Pacific Northwest (PNNL) National Laboratories. During the first year of the project’s execution, through optimization and testing of batteries at PNNL’s Grid Storage Launchpad facility and industrial laboratories, the team identified a suitable test protocol for lead batteries for longer duration storage (i.e. 10-hour discharge) and began collecting data on battery performance and degradation over time. In conjunction with this testing effort, PNNL scientists are developing a levelized cost of storage (LCOS) model appropriate for lead battery ESS in this application across a wide range of lead-acid product lines and manufacturers; the first outputs from this model are forthcoming. In addition to battery testing and techno-economic analysis, the project team is also interested in better understanding the processes that drive battery performance degradation at a fundamental level. To that end, efforts at ANL utilize numerous beamlines at the Advanced Photon Source to better characterize battery plates at numerous points within the battery’s lifetime to gain insight into damage accumulation in these batteries. Specifically, the ANL team has mapped over 100 electrodes at various states-of-health using high energy synchrotron diffraction. Data from these experiments will support the development of 1-dimensional and long-term cycling models during the next two years at ANL. The models will be validated using data that has been collected at ANL as well as that collected by industry partners, suitably anonymized. The final research area, led by scientists at ORNL, focuses on collecting in situ measurements of lead sulfate growth on lead foils at constant chemical potential to support the construction and validation of an atomic-scale model that incorporates simulations of crystal growth reactions. In this presentation, the team looks forward to sharing preliminary results from testing, modeling and techno-economic analysis from our national lab. We will also discuss how the project team was assembled, challenges and opportunities in developing consortium-based projects, and provide best practices for managing projects that bring together academics as well as industrial competitors.