- These scientists are looking at the molecules
inside batteries.
Why do this?
Because they're trying to make the perfect battery.
- In the 21st century, probably the most important
technological revolution we need, is a better battery.
- Imagine batteries that can hold enough energy
to power an airplane?
Or large enough to back up the power grid,
or reliable enough for your Bat-communicator?
- 'Confounded the batteries are dead!'
- This is going to become the way we think about the world-
where batteries are sitting everywhere,
powering all sorts of devices.
Argonne is the leading lab in the world
when it comes to discovering a better battery.
- So we came to Argonne National Laboratory
to see how they're building
the next generation of batteries.
This is "Hard Reset,"
a series about rebuilding our world from scratch.
- Now let's see if we can get it.
I don't think we have the budget to paint you out,
are you cool with that?
- Like most Americans,
I learned all about batteries
from the award-winning science program, "Breaking Bad."
- 'Battery is a galvanic cell,
it's no more than an anode and a cathode
separated by an electrolyte, right?'
- 'Right.'
- Right, batteries use chemicals to store energy
in the form of electricity, which is a new thing for us.
For the last 10,000 years
humanity released energy by setting things on fire.
- The way we've been generating energy
is by burning some sort of a fossil fuel,
say in a vehicle so that we can drive around.
If you look to the future,
there's gonna be a whole other way
we will think about how we generate electricity
and then we are gonna be storing them
inside this box that's called a battery.
- This is Dr. Venkat Srinivasan,
he leads the team here at Argonne
taking batteries to the next level,
so that we can build a future
that doesn't rely so much on setting things on fire.
Can we find materials that will make batteries
as good at storing energy as fossil fuels?
- 'We're going all-electric!'
- So batteries today have come a long way
because of the improvements
of one particular battery technology:
the lithium-ion battery.
And today, they've reached a stage
where we can imagine electric cars going 350/400 miles,
cell phones lasting 24 hours,
storing electricity in our homes-
and we can do this all at reasonable cost.
So lithium-ion is the gold standard
for where we are with battery technology today.
- Even though lithium-ion batteries
have made it so you don't have to carry around
a bunch of AA batteries to keep your Sega Game Gear going.
- 'Sega!'
- There's still progress to be made.
- Battery technology is at a point where there's a lot
of exciting things to work on.
Solid-state batteries,
I think, are one of the most important topics
that I'm super excited by.
I think the future of batteries,
we have to remove the flammable liquids,
so the batteries are gonna get safer.
It's also gonna enable the use of lithium metal
that can go to higher energy density
and decrease the cost of these batteries.
- Solid-state batteries
could have two to three times the energy density
of the lithium-ion batteries we know today,
and maybe even more with new materials;
that could open the door to things like electric flight.
- So there's gonna be a whole, I think, era of innovation
that's gonna come on the vehicle side
because we have a new energy source
that we can take advantage of.
- Batteries can help us replace fossil fuels
which would be nice, but would we just be trading
a dependence on petroleum for a dependence on lithium?
In case you hadn't noticed, it's getting awfully hard
to find good lithium sources these days.
- We have to start thinking about
how are we gonna move away from lithium?
- In a lithium-ion battery,
the lithium is acting as an electrolyte,
moving electrons back and forth
between the cathode and the anode.
But there are other elements that can do the same trick,
and some of them might even be better at it.
- Lithium has a charge of +1,
but there are elements that have a charge of +2 or +3.
So things like magnesium, calcium, zinc and aluminum,
allow us to have more electrons for the same weight
and volume of the ion that it's carrying.
- In theory, batteries with these new chemistries
could hold two to three times
as much as lithium-ion batteries.
That means you could double or triple the range
of something like an EV or electric airplane.
- These chemistries are very hard,
there are a lot of challenges in them,
but if you can solve those challenges
we can make a significant impact on energy density
and move away from lithium.
- These technologies
are not within our grasp yet-they're close though,
tantalizingly close-like a candy bar
stuck under your car seat, we can almost reach them,
but to get there we'll need to use
the most powerful tools on Earth.
Lots of people are working
to develop new kinds of batteries,
but Argonne is the only place where they do it
at the speed of light, I think.
They are doing some crazy stuff at Star Labs
the last time I checked.
- It used to be that the way we found battery materials
was what I call the 'cook and look approach'-
you cook something up,
and then you go look and see if it worked.
Now a single Ph.D. student may spend five years
studying one or two materials, that's all they used to do.
Today, on a computer, we can put through
tens of thousands of these things in a year.
- Part of the work that I'm doing
is to optimize known materials and even molecules
that hasn't been synthesized experimentally,
to design even better materials.
- This is Lei,
she and her team use supercomputers
to find promising new materials to use in batteries.
- Our code will actually take a base material,
attach different functional groups
so we can generate lot of material candidates
for us to screen at the supercomputers.
- Finding new molecules in a computer simulation
sounds like some Tony Stark shit,
I guess that makes Lei the Robert Downey Jr. around here.
- Yeah, that is correct, yeah.
- But every battery material starts
by not just finding something on a computer,
you have to go make them.
- Materials that are identified by the computers
are built and tested on-site at Argonne here in the dry lab.
They keep it super dry in here
so that the lithium doesn't catch fire and explode.
- It'll be fine.
- Anyway, one of these handcrafted,
artisanal batteries might be what replaces the battery
in your phone or car if they can find a better combination
of chemicals to use inside.
- And the way we find out how they behave
is by making small batteries, but we also bring them
to facilities at Argonne like the Advanced Photon Source,
which is where we sitting here today.
- The Advanced Photon Source
is a giant particle accelerator.
As opposed to the basic photon source,
which is just a flashlight.
Here, they speed electrons up to 99.99999999999%
the speed of light-real, real fast.
If it looks familiar to you,
it's probably because they filmed
the 1996 Keanu Reeves film "Chain Reaction" here.
That makes Venkat the Keanu Reeves of this whole operation.
- Correct. - Anyway,
what were we talking about?
- The Advanced Photon Source allows us
to actually shine a light in a battery during its operation
to understand what is happening on the inside.
- Right, this is a giant feedback loop.
The simulations help create a new kind of battery.
The particle accelerator looks deep inside
to see how accurate the simulation was.
And the data from the particle accelerator
makes a better model for future simulations,
so we can make even better batteries.
You can see where this is headed.
Eventually, these computer models
will be able to invent batteries we can't even imagine yet,
and that's where things get really fun.
So, picture a scenario
where we had ubiquitous energy storage
between solar, wind, and nuclear,
we could generate all the electricity we'd ever need
without burning fossil fuels.
Better battery technology
means we could capture and store all that energy
for a much more reliable supply of clean electricity.
- So I think in the next 10, 20, 30 years, there's gonna be
a future that is gonna look very different from the past.
If we had a blank sheet today,
and we redesigned the whole electric grid,
we would do it very differently
than the way we have the grid today.
Solar generation is now cheaper than fossil fuel generation.
We can start to imagine every home
having a solar panel along with a battery pack
to ensure that there is stability.
If that happens, we can remove carbon emissions
from the grid sector,
and that's gonna be an exciting future for us to see.
- We could also potentially travel on the land
or in the air without burning fossil fuels.
- In this country, over two-thirds of the energy consumption
are used for transportation and generating electricity
for the electricity grid.
We need to fundamentally change
the way we use energy so that we can reduce emission.
- I think this decade is gonna be a 'hard reset'
for us to see whether we can make those changes,
and I think battery technology is gonna be the absolute key
to make those changes happen.
- We could do that,
or we could just keep setting stuff on fire.
Either way, I'm sure it'll be fine.