Robert Kostecki, a short-haired person poses for a headshot against a gray background.

Electrochemical energy storage

Chemical energy storage

Thermal energy storage

Mechanical energy storage

Systems, analysis, and markets

 A blue and grey building standing in a foggy forested landscape. The sun obscured behind smokey skies over a blue building. Exterior view of the Advanced Light Source against blue skies. Pink and orange clouds above a lithium brine landscape. Digitally generated image of various scientific graphs and charts hovering over a pair of outstretched hands. A full battery icon is centered in the image. Three scientists working together in a laboratory. Colorful scientific image A lab scientist wearing protective equipment holding out two glass viles. People looking at scientific instrumentation in a lab. Blurred car lights on a highway. Scientists holding a piece of machinery at a lab bench. Orange droplet of water and rippling pool. Blurred blue and orange lights in a tunnel.

Chemical engineer Peng Peng is helping develop a 100% renewable energy grid by investigating new materials for storing hydrogen gas, which can be used like a battery to stash power generated from solar and wind farms. Peng uses computer models to study how lab-scale material prototypes would perform at the industrial scale, and how much they would cost – accelerating the green hydrogen movement from discovery to deployment.

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.

 Two hands with blue gloves are golding tubes in a lab setting. One tube is filled with a piece of copper that has been cleaned of other components and the other with the alkaline solution used to dissolve the quick-release battery binder Sunset at the Salton Sea with mountains in the distance. Illustration of a smart home running on electric and thermal battery power. Two scientists pointing at a screen in the lab. Kristin Persson, a brown-haired person wearing a black dress, points at her electrolyte genome 3D visualizations. Colorful, abstract nebulous image.