Date: Sep 23, 2013 Author: Cathy Proctor Source: bizjournals (
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Colorado's National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Solid Power LLC, based in Louisville, will get a crack at improving batteries used in electric vehicles via a grant from another branch of the U.S. Department of Energy.
NREL, based in Golden, announced Wednesday that one of its projects is among the 22 chosen to get money to "develop transformational electric vehicle energy storage systems" — basically, improving the range and reliability of electric vehicles to make them more enticing to car buyers.
Looking over NREL's announcement, there are a lot of acronyms attached to the project.
For one, the name of the project is the "Robust Affordable Next Generation Energy Storage Systems" — aka: RANGE.
And the folks behind the RANGE project are none other than the DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy — better known as ARPA-E.
ARPA-E recently announced that 22 projects in 15 states would receive a total of $36 million to work on the effort.
At the time ARPA-E said NREL would receive $1 million for its research.
NREL said it is working with project partners EIC Laboratories Inc., based in Norwood, Mass., and Chemtura Corp. (NYSE: CHMT), a specialty chemicals manufacturer based in Philadelphia.
"We're very excited about the opportunity to work on a drastically different battery technology for [electric vehicles]," NREL's project lead Jeremy Neubauer said.
"Not only does it have the potential to meet the demanding safety, cost and performance levels for [electric vehicles] set by ARPA-E, but it could do so sustainably. This project will allow us to build on our preliminary findings and move closer to creating a battery system that will allow the next generation of [electric vehicles] to drive further and more safely," Neubauer said.
NREL's focus is using newly developed, high energy, renewable organic compounds in the battery to boost the amount of energy it can store and reduce the cost.
More information on NREL's energy storage research and development efforts, funded primarily by the DOE's Vehicle Technologies Office, can be found here.
Louisville's Solid Power was slated to receive nearly $3.5 million, according to ARPA-E.
That company is working on a new low-cost, all-solid-state battery for electric vehicles that can store more energy more safely than conventional batteries.
The battery doesn't have any liquid and the materials used are non-flammable and non-volatile, making them more stable in a car crash or if temperatures rise, according to ARPA-E.
