Berkeley Scientists Join Team to Create Better Battery
A team of scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are joining a project to build better batteries for electric cars and energy storage.
The effort will bring together scientists and companies working on breakthrough battery technologies nationwide.
Argonne National Lab near Chicago will lead the $120 million program funded by the Department of Energy.
Lawrence Berkeley's Venkat Srinivasan says the new research will look at ways to dramatically increase the amount of energy a battery can hold, far beyond the technology used in electric cars today.
"These three different ways of storing energy," Srinivasan explains, "will involve materials that have nothing to do with lithium moving back and forth. And we think that these systems can help us get to energy densities and costs that are dramatically different than what we are doing today."
Srinivasan expects breakthroughs from the research to show up in the marketplace within five years.