US Department of Energy

Scientists have developed a scalable, low-cost method to improve the joining of materials in solid-state batteries, resolving one of the big challenges in the commercial development of safe, long-lived energy storage systems.

An exciting new solar material called organic-inorganic halide perovskites could one day help the US achieve its solar ambitions and decarbonize the power grid. One thousand times thinner than silicon, perovskite solar materials can be tuned to respond to different colors of the solar spectrum simply by altering their composition mix.

The Solar Futures Study details the significant role solar will play in decarbonizing the nation's power grid. The study shows that by 2035, solar energy has the potential to power 40% of the nation's electricity, drive deep decarbonization of the grid, and employ as much as 1.5 million people—without raising electricity prices.

The US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has licensed its wireless charging technology for electric vehicles to Brooklyn-based HEVO. The system could one day enable electric vehicles to be charged as they are driven at highway speeds.

National Renewable Energy Laboratory researchers have been exploring the use of thermoplastic composite materials for wind turbines for several years, but they have only just begun to scrape the surface of how these materials perform underwater. For the first time in history, thermoplastic composite blades, which have the potential to revolutionize the marine energy industry, are being tested on a large-scale tidal power turbine.

Because of their high storage capacity, metal oxides are a promising class of potential conversion-type electrode materials for next-generation lithium-ion batteries. Conversion-type electrode materials undergo conversion reactions; when they react with lithium ions, they get converted into entirely new products. Today's commercial batteries are based on a completely different mechanism called intercalation.

In the late 1970s, M. Stanley Whittingham was the first to describe the concept of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, an achievement for which he would share the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Yet even he couldn't have anticipated the complex materials science challenges that would arise as these batteries came to power the world's portable electronics.