A Day in the Half-Life
A Day in the Half-Life
Energy storage: Save your electrons for a rainy day
Have you ever wondered how electricity is available all the time? That’s the seemingly magical science of energy storage. In this episode, we speak to a policy leader and a researcher about the history of piggy-banking power to spend it later, and how this field is evolving to help us prevent extreme weather-related blackouts, adopt more renewable energy, and build bigger, better, more environmentally responsible batteries.
Featuring:
Noël Bakhtian, director of Berkeley Lab's Energy Storage Center. Noel formerly served as director of the Center for Advanced Energy Studies at Idaho National Laboratory and as a senior policy advisor for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Before her shift into policy and leadership, she was an engineer at NASA Ames Research Center working on Mars landing projects.
Mike Gerhardt, research scientist at SINTEF Industry in Norway helping develop new battery and fuel cell technologies using experimentation and computer modeling. Before moving to SINTEF, he was a postdoc in the Energy Conversion Group at Berkeley Lab.
*Special thanks to The Apples in Stereo for use of their song*
This episode was hosted, produced, and edited by Aliyah Kovner. Art by Jenny Nuss.
Audio samples from Halleck, Joao_Janz, and philtre.
Aliyah:
Modern life is enabled by energy on demand. And we have instant power at our fingertips because scientists and engineers have devised many means of energy storage, which is simply taking energy that was gathered or generated previously, converting it to a stable form, and stashing it until we need it again. This is a massive industry, because our homes, businesses, and infrastructure rely on electricity and rely on it being available 24/7. In order to make this possible, energy providers have to take the electricity generated in power plants and by renewables and put it … somewhere … so that there will always be energy to feed into the grid; even when the plants are switched off, the turbines aren't spinning, and the sky is dark. There are lots of ways to do this, from pumping water up a hill to building giant batteries. But as the world's energy demands continue to grow, and our energy grids are increasingly threatened with extreme climate events that can disrupt power distribution, we need more efficient energy storage, we need more resilient energy storage, we need environmentally friendly energy storage, and most of all, we need more.
Aliyah:
I'm Aliyah Kovner, and this is A Day in the Half-Life. Our experts today are working to meet those demands, but in different ways .Mike Gerhardt is a research scientist currently working in Norway to develop and optimize energy storage technologies using a mixture of experimentation and computational modeling. Our other guest is Noel Baktian, a researcher turned policy leader and strategist serving as executive director of Berkeley Lab's Energy Storage Center. In this role, she helps guide research and development that will provide a secure and sustainable energy future for the United States.
Aliyah:
So energy storage is a very broad and kind of vague sounding term. What does that actually mean, scientifically? And what impact does this field have on our everyday lives? Noel, do you want to go first?
Noel:
Oh, sure. Sure. So to me, when I think about energy storage, I think about how it's simply taking some form of energy at one time and then storing it or saving it up so that you can use it at a different time.
Mike:
Yeah. So I think the, the big idea, right, is to think about when you plug something into the wall, where's that electricity coming from. Electricity is the motion of electrons. So all those electrons have to come from somewhere and they're usually being generated by power plants really far away from you set out in the middle of nowhere where people don't really live, and there are these big, big industrial facilities that usually would burn some kind of fossil fuel. What we're trying to do now is generate that electricity using wind turbines and solar panels. So that way we don't have to burn anything. We don't have to put any greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.
Noel:
And so many things we use every day relies on storage or batteries, electronics, your laptop, your phone, just these things that you use every day where you don't have a plug to access that electricity. But you need some other way to power it beyond that. You might not realize that when you plug things into the wall, of course, that's connecting to the grid and the grid itself uses energy storage, and some batteries as well. And then you can also start thinking about our evolving energy needs. Like not just the energy and how we use it today, but at the national lab, we're thinking about the evolving grid, what it means for us to get to clean energy, by including more renewables on the grid. And of course, a lot of renewables, like wind power and solar power are intermittent and variable, which means we need something like energy storage, whether it's batteries or other to help, help, help make that all work.
Noel:
And then of course, there's electrified mobility. So thinking about transportation and how, you, you can't have a car that's just stuck on the grid. You need batteries so that you can be moving around and be mobile. We think about building flexibility, a lot of energy use in the United States and worldwide comes from buildings and people's lives in buildings and their work in buildings. And then of course there's high energy industry. So all of the manufacturing, food, steel paper, et cetera, very high energy processes. And there's potential to use energy storage in, in, in those areas to decrease the carbon footprint of industry. And then finally, I'll just mention remoteness and resilience is a big area where energy storage can play a role.
Mike:
Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned the, the grid applications in particular. That's a place where I did a lot of my Ph.D. research in is that problem that you mentioned about how do you store energy from a solar panel, for example, so that you can use that energy at night when the sun isn't shining, or how do you store energy from a wind turbine? When, so you can use the energy when the wind isn't blowing. One of the challenges with the electric grid, the way it's set up right now is that all of the electricity that goes on it needs to get used. And the other way around whenever people want electricity, it has to be there for them. We, there isn't a whole lot of storage on the grid right now, and that makes it hard to operate when you're trying to rely on something like wind and solar, that it's, you can't tell for sure when it's going to be there, because you might have a cloud come by and block the sun, or you might have the wind die down. And so that's a place where I see energy storage in different kinds of large scale, energy storage being really important.
Aliyah:
How have these technologies evolved over time? Immediately I think of things like hydroelectric dams, hydroelectricity, but what is being used right now and what was being used in the past?
Noel:
Yeah. So if we're talking about the grid about utility scale, pump storage hydro power is a good place to start. I think one of the earliest facilities was in the early 1900s in Switzerland where you're storing water, you're pumping water up an incline and you're storing it there as gravitational potential energy. And then when you want it back, you just release the water and it turns turbines at the bottom. And actually more than, I think way more than 90% of our global storage of that kind is pump storage hydro power. So it's a major type that's used right now.
Aliyah:
Wow, even today. Okay, great.
Mike:
Yeah, it's huge.
Noel:
And then I just want to mention that it was in the 1950s that lithium-ion electrochemistry was actually invented at Berkeley lab. Charles Tobias established the electrochemical research program at the lab in 1954, which was the first program of its kind. And it really paved the way for the development of rechargeable lithium battery technologies that have revolutionized our portable electronics industry and our lives, if you think about it. And of course, lithium, ion batteries are now the predominant energy storage type being deployed every year. So there's been this transition to lithium-ion.
Aliyah:
I see.
Mike:
Yeah. And those batteries are really in everything. They're in the laptop that I'm struggling to use. [Laughing] They're in my headset, they're in my phone, they're in the electric scooters you see kicking around campus, they're in cars. What else are they in? I don't know all kinds of different, anything, small, lightweight, portable, cause that's lithium ions' big advantage is that it's very light and very powerful. And it can store a lot of energy in a really small space in a really small weight.
Aliyah:
So Mike, how are those lithium ion batteries that you said are in so many things now, like all the consumer electronics that are on the market, how is that different than say, the batteries inside of a flashlight?
Mike:
Good question. So, the battery is inside a flashlight or a different chemistry. So different chemical compounds like the lithium and lithium ion allow you to store different amounts of energy and in different ways. And they cost different things too sometimes. So the, you might be thinking of like the D cells or the double A's that are, you usually buy them in big packs at the supermarket. And they're really cheap, but you can really only use them once before you dispose of them, usually. And those are called alkaline batteries and they use a compound called manganese and manganese oxide to store, to store energy. So it's a reaction with that manganese compound that actually stores the electrical energy with lithium ions. The reaction is with lithium. Lithium is a lot lighter and because of its chemistry, it can store a lot more energy per lithium ion.
Mike:
We call that the voltage of the battery. So the voltage is usually printed on the side somewhere and for the manganese batteries or the alkaline batteries, it's around 1.5, lithium is 3.7 to four point something. So you can store like two or three times as much energy, um, with the same amount of atoms and then the atoms themselves weigh less. So lithium is a lot lighter, a lot more powerful can be recharged more, but it's more expensive. And so if you need, if it's something where you can easily pop out, like a little lid or something and swap the battery back in, and you don't use it that much, sometimes those AA alkaline cells are fine, but if you want something that's rechargeable, that's going to last awhile that you'll use frequently for a couple of years or a decade or so – that's where you want to start looking into things that are more rechargeable, like lithium-ion.
Aliyah:
So our lithium ion battery is the answer to energy storage on a large scale, or ... What can they be used for and what can they not be used for?
Mike:
They're great for a lot of different things. The portable small-scale electronics, one of the challenges that they're having is that they don't last for a very long, they don't have a very long lifetime, right. If you think about your phone battery, it, your phone usually starts to get slower and not hold as much charge after a year or two for larger grid, scale, energy storage systems. We want to be able to install that and have it sit there for like 20 or 30 years. Cause that's how long power plants last. You want to be able to build something and have it work for like forever and not think about it anymore. And so that's where some of the larger scale energy storage technologies start to change away from lithium ion towards things like, um, the pump hydroelectric power and some of the work that I did in my Ph.D, which is, they're called flow batteries. And so in that case, rather than having the components packed into like a really tiny battery cell, like you see at the supermarket, you have your reactants stored in giant tanks outside of the battery itself. And so those tanks can be like the size of a building.
Aliyah:
Oh, wow.
Mike:
So you can build a battery big enough to store energy for a building, a city block, a whole city, if you wanted, and then access that energy whenever you need it.
Aliyah:
Well, I would not think of something that big as being a battery. So it's, it's interesting to hear just how broad that term is and what that means. So are flow batteries being deployed now for things like powering multiple buildings being hooked up to the grid?
Mike:
Yeah. Yeah. So, the department of energy has a global energy storage database where you can find out a lot of these things, it's online. I know that there are a lot of vanadium ion flow batteries. So another chemistry thing, vanadium ions are kind of cool because they have multiple different reactions you can use to store energy, and because of the way flow batteries work, it makes it a little bit easier to use vanadium than a lot of the other things.
Noel:
And, I'll just point out that what's interesting when you start to think about the different uses, use cases, is there's different types of battery characteristics that work. So, a lot of the current batteries that we think of are the current energy storage technologies we think about were really developed and brought to scale across the globe because of the electronics industry or because of transportation and like electric vehicles. And that's all mobile stuff, which means you need lightweight. But when you start to think about grid power and the energy storage needs for grid, these can be stationary. So all of a sudden you don't have that extra constraint of the lightweight or high energy density. And, and you can start thinking about bigger weight, bigger volume type technologies that just weren't possible before for use in cars or electronics.
Mike:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. It doesn't have to fit in my pocket so we can make it out of things that are big and heavy and cheaper.
Noel:
Exactly
Aliyah:
Has there been a lot of progress for those large scale, energy storage systems, like besides, for pumped hydroelectric power? What other kind of massive scale industrial energy storage technologies are either being used right now or kind of in development right now?
Noel:
Well, I think compressed air energy storage fits under that category. It's kind of another mechanical type energy storage where you compress air. And then when you release that air, generally speaking, it, it goes through turbines and turns turbines, and you know, you usually use caverns underground for, for this type of thing. So we're talking yeah. Geographically constrained, but major amount of energy.
Mike:
Yeah. I would say the two biggest ones are probably hydroelectric and compressed air. Flow batteries are starting to come onto the scene a little bit, particularly actually in Japan, there's a company called Sumitomo electric. That's building a lot of them. Another kind of fun. One is flywheel energy storage. I don't think it's a very big one, but basically you have a big metal wheel that you spin super fast. And then when, so you get it spinning and kind of like a top, it just keeps spinning and spinning and spinning. But that's a way of storing energy. You keep that thing spinning. And then eventually when you need electricity, you can kind of hook the ends of a generator onto it and that spinning will slow down a little bit as the generator converts that spinning into electrical energy.
Aliyah:
That's neat. It's, you know, it sounds, it sounds very deceptively simple. And so, you know, that's, I guess maybe the brilliance of it is it's taking a fundamental concept and then using it for energy. So that's really neat.
Mike:
I think it's, the deceptively simple thing is, is an interesting point because one of the challenges with energy storage at the grid scale too, is you have to make it dirt cheap. And so you have to kind of look for things that are reliable and simple, but then really engineer the crap out of them. I don't know if can I say that ...[Laughs] Really engineer them to be really efficient and really inexpensive for the amount of energy that they store.
Noel:
And I'll just mention that as, as Mike's been talking about the grid and, and these new types of energy storage technologies, there's this concept that's really been bubbling up about long duration, energy storage, and thinking about, you know, we, we might need to start thinking about this paradigm shift that, you know, lithium ion batteries are pretty good for the, you know, four hour [duration], which is really where the utilities have a found a sweet spot as far as asking for storage that they can meet that. But we have a lot of researchers now across the national labs and, and all over the country thinking about what's the right mix of short duration versus long duration energy storage for an ideal future grid, given all of the renewables that we want to add to the grid? And in fact, DOE has just announced an Earthshot, they have their Earthshot Initiative, and they're announcing the series of Earthshots that this administration is going to be going after. And they just announced the latest one was a long duration energy storage Earthshot. So that means that DOE is getting very serious about this and the nation is. And so it's an exciting time to be working in energy storage.
Aliyah:
That's great because it does seem like we need energy storage devices and technologies that can provide power for more than four hours to fill in the gaps.
Mike:
Right. You know, you can think about if you wanted to use only solar panels, for example, you might need it to power for it. Well in Norway, the night is less than four hours right now because it's summer so I don't have this problem, [laughing] but in the winter, I'm only going to get three or four hours of sunlight, and I'm probably going to need the power of my computer for longer than that. And so there's, there's a lot of really interesting things you can do once you get up to more like 10 or 12 hours with regards to storing energy from solar cause it basically having a longer duration. And when we're talking about duration, by the way, we mean, how long can you discharge the battery for? Right. So like how long can you operate it? How long can you push it really at its limit? Not like how long can we hold it for? Yeah. So those are, those are different.
Aliyah:
Right, OK.
Mike:
Yeah. So it's, you need, you need to be able to, it'd be nice to be able to store energy seasonally, right? Like I just talked about how we get tons of sunlight in the summer and we're probably going to get not that much in the winter. And so you need that kind of duration where you can, if you're building extra energy in the summer, you can hang onto it and then use it in the winter. But also the battery needs to be able to discharge, to output energy for 10 to 12 hours to, to tide you over until the next day that you see the sun or the next time the wind starts blowing
Aliyah:
Earlier this year, huge regions of the south and southeastern United States were devastated by extreme winter storms that knocked power out for millions of people, caused a lot of damage, and put a lot of people in harm's way. These outages made concepts like energy security and grid resilience front page news, and huge talking points. I was hoping you could explain how energy storage technologies present and future can prevent these kinds of events from happening again, prevent things from being as bad as they were earlier this year?
Mike:
Yeah. So that's exactly the kind of challenge that energy storage can hope to solve. I think one of the big problems, particularly in Texas was the extreme cold made a lot of people want to turn on their heating systems and their heating systems use natural gas, right? And then the power plants needed natural gas to run their turbines. And then, but then it was actually too cold for some of them to start. And so they wanted the gas, people wanted the gas, all of a sudden there isn't enough to go around and you can't use electric heaters either because the power plants shut down because they can't turn on. And so it just kind of created this compounding effect where this one weakness in the electric grid paralyzed it, right. We basically have three electric grids in the U.S. There's one in the Eastern U.S., there's one in the Western U.S., and there's one in Texas. And so that's why like when you have big storms, you can impact huge areas of the U.S. can end up not having electricity because it's hard to locally turn off and fix only parts of the system.
Mike:
And so with energy storage, you know, you would be able to have, you could imagine, several backup batteries spread out among a neighborhood or within houses or something like that, that gives you a couple of days worth of energy so that you can run an electric heater and keep your fridge going and keep your food, keep your food from spoiling. And so with things like that, that's what we mean when we were talking about making the grid more resilient is we can overcome the, the loss of a power plant or something like that. Whether we're talking about a wind turbine being intermittent or a gas turbine, all of a sudden being unavailable.
Aliyah:
I see.
Noel:
And I'll just add in, there's a lot of researchers at Berkeley Lab that think about resilience. We have a major project just got published in nature, energy journal, which is really exciting, but it's all about thinking about how we can decarbonize the rail sector. So decarbonize trains. And these diesel trains are not good for the environment. Not good for people in a lot of the low and middle income communities. But the interesting resilience pitch here is that if you have a train now that has a battery car attached to it, which the paper is finding to be feasible, financially, in a budget sense, that if there's an event in Texas or a blackout event in California, or in New York or wherever that is, you can actually take these battery cars and because they're on the rail system, their batteries on wheels, you can ship them off to wherever you need. So, they're mobile in a sense.
Mike:
Oh, that's cool.
Noel:
So yeah, we're, we're working with Department of Energy on this to see how we can move towards demonstration because it could solve both problems. We're decarbonizing the train system, but, but we also have a resilience plan.
Aliyah:
So it'd be stored power, delivered to you.
Noel:
Exactly.
Aliyah:
That's pretty awesome. So, now that we're kind of talking about not only how we can have stored energy when we need it, which, you know, sometimes we don't even have the power we need, but talking about how, in addition, we can improve the total outlook by reducing carbon emissions. So kind of thinking about the environmental aspect of all of this, I wanted to circle back to batteries, because I understand that one longstanding issue with lithium ion batteries, despite how efficient they've become and amazing amount of things that they have enabled is that the cost and environmental impact of sourcing the materials needed to make them can be quite high. And so since these batteries are everywhere, now the burden on the planet and the economy is really only growing. So can either of you tell me about any work being done to solve these problems?
Noel:
Yeah. Well, I'll talk a little bit about that. So scaling lithium ion batteries to multiple terawatt hours per year production, which is what we're going to need in this blossoming energy storage world, has ... The challenge is constraints on elements such as nickel and cobalt, for instance, which are the primary elements used in cathodes, which is a part of the battery. And the bottom line is that the supply chain for some of those elements, isn't very robust. So a vast majority of cobalt for instance, comes from Russia or the Congo, and there's, you know, there's environmental concerns as well. And of course related is the cost of materials which Mike has talked about. So as we're trying to drive down the cost of batteries, so they could be useful to more people in, in, in more use cases, it's something to think about because there's a floor price for materials.
Noel:
So for certain raw materials, all materials have a floor price, right? And so Berkeley Lab is working on new battery chemistries to go dirt cheap, excuse the pun. But no cobalt, no nickel. And we have this new chemistry called DRX or disordered rock salts with excess lithium, which avoid those types of elements at large. And when you think about the big picture here, this is about national security at the end of the day, when you're talking about supply chains. This is about economic security and, you know, trying to build batteries here in the U.S. and build up our battery production here in the U.S. In fact, in February, the Biden-Harris administration issued an executive order on America's supply chains with a whole section on risk to battery supply. And the resulting preliminary report was just released last month, I think, okay, this is actually one of the major Energy Storage Center capabilities at Berkeley lab, we have this incredible expertise in supply chains, especially lithium from modeling analysis to the subsurface experts, to the technical experts that are working with the world's leading companies on lithium extraction to the battery experts, creating the new chemistries for the cathodes, like I mentioned, and all with this focus on environmental justice and equity as well.
Noel:
And there's actually a lot going on in this space in lithium valley, which is a play on Silicon valley, but it's right here in Southern California. And there's a national dialogue as well, growing in this direction, as we move towards growing that battery production responsibly here in the U.S. You know, folks might be interested that we just started up a community of practice to bring together folks at the nexus of energy storage and energy justice, because that's such an important topic right now. And we're at the very beginning, we haven't even had our first meeting yet, but it's, it's a, that needs to happen and it hopefully will have impact on the types of research we're doing and how we do it.
Mike:
Definitely, definitely. There's a lot of different aspects to how we produce store and use energy. And so we talked a little bit about some of the critical materials that go into lithium, ion batteries, things like sourcing of cobalt and nickel from Russia and the Congo and things like that. Unfortunately some of those cobalt mines in particular can be very exploitative. And so that's not something we really want to build the energy of the energy system of the future on, right. How do we do this in a way that's, that's fair for everybody thinking about not just making sure everybody has access to energy, but that the things that we build and the things that we use to get to that goal are, are sustainable and fair and not exploiting anybody.
Aliyah:
Right. That's so important. I think it's, it's really cool to hear that because it's another aspect of where this field is really like, thinking from the ground up. You know, a lot of times you discover something and then you have to, you know, retroactively engineer a system that actually allows it to be adopted, or that makes its adoption practical and, you know, environmentally conscious. So it's neat that's how those conversations are all happening now.
Mike:
Yeah. And that's one of the things that I really like about energy and energy storage research in general is it is so interdisciplinary. It's everything from the sociologists, trying to understand how are people going to use these technologies? How can we make them fairly with this energy justice aspect to how do they work on a, on a chemical level? How do we keep them hot enough or cold enough, how do we make them more efficient? How do we make a lot of them? What happens if we make too many of them that there's so many questions that come need people of so many different backgrounds. So like, I get to talk to mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, chemists, physicists, policy people, all sorts of different people from all sorts of walks of life. And I get to learn a lot about all of these different little things.
Noel:
Speaking of Mike, you know, I know there's a lot of lessons learned from Europe in this space. And I just love to hear your thoughts on the European side of all this.
Mike:
Yeah, absolutely. It's been really interesting. Starting in the U.S. and then coming over to Europe and learning what the landscape is like here. One of the things that really struck me is how focused they are specifically on manufacturing of batteries. How do we crank these things out as quickly as we can? How do we use some kind of computer models to understand what the different manufacturing methods have to do with how the battery operates and how long it lasts and how many of them they can make? Every country in Europe is concerned about its supply chain as well. And so you see "gigafactories" popping up in almost all of them. I know there's some in Italy, there's some here in Norway. There's some in Germany, I'm pretty sure too. And so we see that more and more, these countries are saying, okay, we're going to need lithium and we're going to need batteries. So we need to figure out how to make them and how to make them quickly and cheaply and efficiently.
Noel:
Yeah. And just to tie into that, another really exciting area that we're working on at Berkeley Lab is we call it the science of manufacturing, kind of related to what you're saying, right? So it's like, how do you accelerate this process of discovery to manufacturing to deployment? And we're, you know, working on thinking through self-driving labs, using artificial intelligence and machine learning for automated experiments and high-throughput synthesis for testing. So you can just get more done more quickly and have more data. And beyond that, it accelerates us to 10 to 50 times faster than the state of the art, for example, which is going to be needed because we know lithium-ion took decades to go from discovery to hitting the streets. And we just need to be a little bit faster than that to get us to the clean energy future we all need.
Aliyah:
That's, that's really cool. And that is something that I wanted to ask you both about. I, I sort of wanted to talk about the pace of this field because, you know, a focus of this podcast is, is how these fields evolve over time. And it sounds like things are really accelerating in energy storage science because of new technologies, like machine learning. So you know just sort of zooming out a little bit. This is something humans have been doing for a really long time, right? Like taking water, moving it up, and then having the potential energy, you know, from gravity store that energy for later. So, you know, we've been doing this for a while, but would you, would you say the field has been sort of slow and steady or has it been punctuated by some big moments? And if so, I guess, you know, what were those really big moments?
Mike:
Oh, I think probably the biggest recent moment is the advent of the lithium ion battery itself. It won the Nobel prize in 2019. It's the reason we have laptops and cell phones that weigh less than five pounds. It's, that's been a huge driver for a lot of different technologies. As someone who's, you know, relatively younger, right? So like I'm new, I'm fairly new to this field, but that's the one that seems to be, you know, to me, what has really changed in the last 10 or 20 years since I was a kid to now is how much portable technology and electric vehicles have really come on. And that's been driven by advancements in batteries.
Noel:
And I'll just add, it still blows my mind. You know, I started my career as a scientist and engineer. It still blows my mind, how little we understand about very basic things, about electrochemistry, about, about a lot of the science and the importance of science, both basic and applied to get us to the technologies we need in the future. For instance, one example is we still have so much research going on on the interfaces between materials, which is an important part of batteries. And a lot of work is happening in this area for all kinds of batteries, including solid state batteries. And I just actually learned today that there's something like 40,000 papers that have been published on sci, which is all about interfaces. And we still don't understand how these things work and how we can use them to our advantage. So the importance of science and engineering is something that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle as we're excited about new technologies, but it's really the bedrock upon which all of these new exciting developments can exist.
Aliyah:
Right? Cause it's advancements in, like basic science, chemistry and material science, right. That's really what the revolution has been.
Noel:
And to your point Aliyah, I think one of the revolutions that needs to happen and is on its way to happening is around the manufacturing of these things. If you think about or learn about how batteries in particular today get manufactured, it's mostly through this process called roll to roll, which basically imagine you've probably seen those videos of newspaper plants, where the stuff is moving between rolls that are spinning and it's something like that. And what's inside a lot of the batteries that you would probably imagine in your head is like, it's, it's in layers in the battery cylindrically. For instance. So we've been doing this role to role since the 19th century, like literally the 1800s. It's a, it's a very old manufacturing process and created yeah, there's, there's updates to that in current manufacturing of batteries, but there's advanced manufacturing now and new techniques. And, I'm excited about this mixture that Berkeley Lab brings, which is, you know, new chemistries plus the new science of manufacturing altogether could be part of how we start to rebuild battery production here in the U.S.
Aliyah:
From your perspective, what is the partnership like between institutions like Berkeley Lab that are doing basic science research and some applied science research and with people, you know, with public utilities, with kind of the people who would put this into effect on a large scale, what does that working relationship like these days?
Noel:
Yeah, that's a great question. Because although we are an Office of Science lab, we pride ourselves on thinking across, you know, all the way across the technology readiness level and, and working to make our science and technology really useful for humans. And so we actually have quite a few partnerships with utilities, public utility commissions, state energy offices, et cetera, across the country. In fact, we have a whole shop on technical assistance that does just that with folks in and helps them understand how their policies are working and, and how, how to make it all work better. And that touches many things even beyond energy storage. So, yeah, it's a, it's an important piece of this is actually getting this tactically on the ground, so that systems are being deployed and used.
Aliyah:
Right. And that's great. It's great to know that those networks and those networks already exist. I think that is a really wonderful thing to hear so that when new technologies are getting ready to roll out like that handoff can happen and that that's so important. Right. Cause a lot of times when we talk about basic science discoveries, the time to application it's very long, so anything we can do to shorten that path so crucial.
Noel:
Exactly. In fact, a huge piece of the link between science and technology is thinking at the very beginning, when you're doing your science, at least for applied science about what, what is this going to be used for? Right. And one of the tools that we use at Berkeley Lab is we have several people that do something called technoeconomic analysis. So they actually work with the scientists and the people at the very lower level stages of technology development to say, if this was successful, what would this look like? How would it work? How expensive would it be? What supply chains does this rely on? What's the life cycle analysis of this? And I think that's really important so that the directions that we're starting off on at the very early stages, which might take a few years or decades, right. That we make sure we're going in the right direction at the very beginning. So bridging science to technology, to deployment, it's really important.
Mike:
I love people who do technoeconomics because it's super challenging and super detail oriented, and they are wizards and incredible magicians at being able to explain to me, you know, exactly how important each little step I'm doing might make, might be right, or how valuable it could be, whether or not it's going to be something like the lithium ion battery that has just taken over all these different applications or whether it's going to be the, the, the thing that was competing with the VCR that I don't remember.
[Laughing]
Aliyah:
Noel. You're a scientific leader and advisor who's used to studying and trying to solve really big issues. How did you come into your current role?
Noel:
Well, I'll go back to the Bay Area, when I used to live there as a grad student. I was an aerospace engineer training at Stanford. So a fluid dynamicist by training, with my Ph.D doing a lot of my workout at NASA Ames Research Center.
Aliyah:
Awesome.
Noel:
And after my Ph.D, I took what I thought would be a one-year fellowship in Washington, DC, to learn more about how science policy gets made. And I actually ended up staying in DC for about five years with roles in Congress, DARPA, DOE headquarters, and then the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. So my scope very quickly widened from my very focused academic work at the, you know, the cutting edge of a single field – like an academic works on – to an international horizon encompassing climate change, domestic innovation policy, and so much more. I moved over to the National Lab system after that. And I served on the senior leadership team at Idaho National Laboratory, where I was director for Consortium, a collaborative center between the national lab and all the public research universities in that region across two states. I actually just started at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in November. And I'm standing up this new center focused on energy storage. It's just a really exciting time for energy storage globally and here in the U.S. and I'm having a blast.
Aliyah:
What, what drew you to working kind of on a larger scale of zooming out and, you know, managing policy and becoming an advisor from the research you were doing, what kind of resonated with you about that?
Noel:
Sure. What happened was the last year of my Ph.D, somewhere around there, these major decisions were getting made at the U.S. government level about, you know, potentially pulling out of the international space station agreement, which is international. There was a decision made to end the Space Shuttle program. And here I am sitting in my cubicle and NASA Ames thinking, oh my gosh, I wanted my life to be about space and landing humans on Mars. How are these decisions getting made in the government? And so I decided to go to Washington D.C. and learn a little bit more.
Aliyah:
So Mike, I, like everyone else on the planet, depend on the technologies that you and your colleagues develop yet. I have no mental picture of what it's like to be a battery scientist. How did you choose this field? And what does a day in the life look like for you?
Mike:
I chose this field. It's kind of a funny story, I guess. So when I was a freshman in college, everyone told me to take this one particular material science class because it was easier than the chemistry requirements. And I wasn't feeling very confident about myself. So I took this other course instead and it was taught by a professor who was really into large-scale battery research. And he was saying, well, I need undergraduate interns work in my lab. Our goal is to make a battery that can store power from solar panels and wind turbines and release that energy later when it's needed. And I thought that was a really cool and interesting goal, and I wanted to learn more about it. So I was really lucky in a lot of ways that I got pushed into this class. It was a lot of fun.
Mike:
I got to work with that professor in his lab. I remember one time there was this sensor on one of the batteries and it was kind of hanging off of a ledge and I dropped my pen and I bent down to pick it up. And as I stood up my back, hit the sensor and broke it right off the battery. And it's this super fancy, super expensive, thousand-dollar ceramic pressure sensor kind of thing. And I, being a new undergraduate, I felt horrified. I thought, well, that's the end of my scientific career. I'm getting fired and sent back home. I'm going to have to explain to my parents why I got kicked out of college and [Laughing] Right? But I didn't know. I was, I was a kid from a random town in the middle of Massachusetts somewhere. I, I had never been to the big city before. I didn't know what I was doing. And, the postdoc, the guy kind of in charge of that equipment looked at me and he said, well, you know, you're not a real scientist until you've broken a hundred thousand dollars-worth of things. You gotta keep breaking more stuff.
Aliyah:
That's, that's real. Right? That's what it's actually like in labs.
Mike:
So I, I, I break stuff. That's my goal. [Laughing]
Aliyah:
Awesome. And how did you get to the position you are in right now? Kind of what was the last couple of years been like for you?
Mike:
Yeah, good question. So after my, uh, breaking things in undergraduate, I eventually moved over to more simulation kind of work because it's a little bit harder to break a computer than lab equipment. And so that's how I ended up actually at Berkeley Lab was doing a postdoctoral research in batteries and fuel cells. And then my work there got me recruited essentially by this Norwegian company. They reached out to me and they asked me, you know, we have an opening for someone with your skillset. Do you want to come to Norway? And I said, sure, can I come visit? And they said, no, there's a global pandemic right now. [Laughing] So sort of on a leap of faith, I, I moved to Trondheim. I have was interested in going because my great grandmother actually came to the U.S. from Norway.
Aliyah:
What is it like as an American scientist going to conduct research in another country? Have, have, has it been different, you know, with cultural or even language-based stumbling blocks, or has it been sort of like, you know, science is science and we're doing it?
Mike:
Honestly, it's most, mostly the latter – science is science and we're doing it. It's great. Our lab primarily speaks English because there are so many international people here. Like I work with the guy who recruited me, is actually from Atlanta.
Aliyah:
I love that. I love how global it is and that you just meet people from everywhere.
Mike:
No, and that's, that's one of the cool parts about it. And when I get out away from the lab is when I start to run into a lot of the interesting cultural and language barrier types of things, like, at the supermarket, I have no idea what's going on half the time. That's kinda it?
Aliyah:
Because you're, you are on the research side of things, at this moment. What are you really excited about?
Mike:
That is a good question. I think what could be really cool is this idea of electrifying all of our transportation. So the trains that Noel was talking about, we're even thinking about making battery powered airplanes, and fuel cell powered airplanes, which fuel cells we haven't really touched on much, but it's a way of generating electricity without any greenhouse gas emission byproducts. And so if we can start to do things like that, like if we can have big battery, power trucks, battery, power, trains, airplanes, boats, then we can continue to move around and continue to have a more global society without putting more carbon dioxide and more greenhouse gases into the air. Right. But yeah, I think there's one other thing I would want to say. It's not really about science. It's more about people who are interested in being scientists is that we need, because energy and energy storage is such a big and interdisciplinary field.
Mike:
We need a ton of people working on it from different backgrounds, from different walks of life who think about things in different ways. And so when I think back to like, when I was in high school and in college, I kind of felt like, oh, I don't know if I'm cut out for the science thing. It seems really hard. And I don't really get it. And all the people around me seem way smarter. And I don't know if I really belong here. It ... everyone feels that at some point it's called imposter syndrome and it happens. It happens to me, right, still. I'm thinking, geez, why did this company hire me from overseas? Like, did they, did I come as advertised? Am I doing a bad job? And they just don't want to tell me because that's the Norwegian culture. Like, I don't know, but it's, it's not a reason not to pursue something that you're interested in. And so if that's something that I can, I don't know if that fits into the podcast, but if that's something that I can make clear about it, don't listen to that voice that is telling you, you're not cut out for this because you probably are,
Aliyah:
You probably are. And we need you
Mike:
And we need you.
Aliyah:
That's a perfect take-home message. Big thanks to our guests, Noel and Mike, and thanks to you for listening to a Day in The Half-Life. If you’re enjoying this show so far, please like us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
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