How can we make better batteries? | Dr. Shirley Meng | TEDxChicago

Do we want an energy transition that takes energy out of the climate change conversation? Even if some of you don't care about that. Do we want an energy transition that reduces the price of electricity to a specific level? Do we want an energy transition that takes us towards energy independence? Therefore, electrification everywhere with electricity from wind, solar and other renewables requires energy storage and

batteries

are the key to unlocking this sustainable future and to

make

this transition a reality we need

batteries

, many of them today , lithium iron batteries that power your phones and your laptops and some of the cars, global production barely exceeds one tatt hour per year and we need to do this 10 times faster and faster to help you understand what an hour means and The United States requires us to produce one terawatt hour.

To keep the country running for a single hour to fulfill the mission of deeply decarbonizing our economy, we will need a few hundred hours of batteries. Today we only achieve 1% of what we need and this is a huge gap and we must F This gap in less than a decade is unprecedented in our history, however, today I am going to show reasons for hope that it can be done. The few hundred terawatt hours is what we call the scale gap and it comes down to two critical factors that our rapidly expanding needs are, first, our growing love for electric cars and, second, our changing electrification. of the global renewable energy network, especially vehicle electrification, is gaining momentum.

Electric vehicles are truly affordable and reliable means of transportation. Today, 2023 will be the first year there will be more than 1 million electric cars. They are sold in the United States, representing approximately 6.5% of the total of 16 million cars sold in this country worldwide. We expect that by 2050 there will be 1.5 billion cars in the world. Clearly we need 10 times more batteries to replace all internal combustion ones. Motorized automobile transportation is responsible for one-third of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. We estimate that globally we need around 150 three-hour batteries to meet future transport demand and as I said now, we barely have more than 2 hours, this is a huge gap to fill the batteries used in electric cars;

In fact, the success of electric vehicles will depend on the advancement of batteries, we need to store more energy in batteries without sacrificing safety or cost, so imagine the batteries we will need in the next decade. I would like to have the batteries and we should have batteries that allow us to have a driving range of 500 miles per charge or charge them very quickly in five to six minutes and have a longer battery life will be longer than the EV parts and Those batteries will be reused or recycled. Achieving these advances will accelerate the adoption of electric cars and revolutionize the way we travel, so let's solve the scale problem first, move now towards large-scale energy storage.

We all know that wind and solar energy, those renewable energies provide us with clean energy and practically unlimited energy source for all of us, however, the intermittent nature of these sources imposes a major challenge at this time we produce energy, we use the energy as It is produced without ways to store electricity outside of our personal devices and that is a big problem. For renewable energy, wind and solar only produce electricity when the wind blows or when the sun shines brightly and that may not be the time when we need the energy the most, so the simple idea would be: why Don't you plug the batteries into these?

Sources store energy in readiness where the best idea is needed, but as you've probably guessed, we don't really have battery technologies that allow us to do this with true skill, speed, cost and reliability, but what if we did? Achieve the generalization of the use of renewable energies. Humanity will need a few hundred extra hours of battery capacity. We can reduce this gap if we successfully develop low-cost green hydrogen technology or if we can deploy advanced nuclear energy in a timely manner, but one thing. What is certain is that we will need to increase energy storage quickly.

Our recent innovations in lithium-iron batteries have prepared us for an era in which batteries are increasingly more reliable, more efficient and more environmentally friendly, but I personally believe that lithium-iron batteries alone do not They will close this issue. Gap in the next decade, so at first glance it seems impossible to do, it seems like we need a little magic, so before I tell you how we can do it, let me tell you a personal story. My late father was a civil engineer specializing in the construction of hydroelectric dams in China in the 1980s. He became fascinated by the renewable nature between water and electricity when my father explained to me how it works today.

Hydroelectric power provides one sixth of the world's energy. I have to thank my father. the first mentor in my life who showed me how magical renewable energy is once we solve the difficult problems of energy storage, other renewable sources such as solar and wind will achieve much greater abilities than what hydroelectricity offers, so I've spent my career working on what seems to be magical is working with some of the exciting new battery chemistries. I don't know what you all dream about. I dream of interactions between matter and iron to be able to store as much wind and solar energy as possible for me, that's the magic.

What is needed for the battery of the future? Today I am going to tell you a little about the magic that comes out of my group and that can give us the batteries we need to close this scale gap and have it in a short time. When we'll need them, our group at the University of Chicago and Agon National Laboratory are working on the magic of new battery chemistries, such as sodium batteries, air batteries, metal batteries, and solid-state batteries, that will allow us to have batteries more powerful that are smaller lighter that can be charged in minutes and built with abundant materials that are completely recyclable from the atom to the system We treat batteries as a complex living system, in fact, batteries are like human bodies, their Performance depends on the elements and components of the system that the doctor is looking for. to prolong human life as a battery doctor, that is what we do, we hope to prolong the life of batteries, we examine the materials of batteries before, during and after use, actually we have very sophisticated machines, this is called Advanced Photon Source, basically sophisticated x-ray machines for batteries.

That allows us to gain an atomic-level understanding of batteries so we can design

better

ones effectively and we can find ways to extend battery life, just like when doctors give you a diagnosis and treatment after observing the outcome of the test. blood test if you are sick Doctors also aim to help you achieve a more active and meaningful life, so we always have to keep improving batteries. My group houses one of the most advanced electron microscopes, actually one of its kind in this nation, which will help us unlock the secret of how materials can store more energy, allowing us to double or triple the energy density of batteries of tomorrow, allowing you to store more energy per charge, excellent healthcare should also be affordable and accessible to everyone, battery materials should be the same as what our group is on.

At the forefront of the development of sodium battery technologies, sodium, unlike lithium, is widely available in the United States and batteries made with it do not require any critical elements such as lithium, cobalt or copper, and for scaling sodium batteries at tatt time we can take advantage of existing infrastructure. Designed and built for Li iron batteries, including gigawatt-scale factories, today sodium batteries still have a shorter lifespan compared to Li iron batteries, but we see improvements every day. There you have it, your home battery storage, your electron cooler, imagine walking in. In one of the rooms of your house you have this box that takes up half the size of a refrigerator, it is great, small, quiet and robust, it can be charged in a matter of minutes and it is completely recyclable and, most importantly, it will give you It will allow you to use your entire home off-grid for seven days without recharging from the grid.

This is the future that our team is working on. It is not a dream. It is the reality. We are working on two batteries of this type that will empower people and communities to achieve energy independence by reducing our dependence on the traditional electrical grid and enabling true democratization of energy, this range of a few hundred terawatt hours of battery storage is going to be very, very expensive; We estimate that more than $10 trillion of manufacturing investment will be needed globally; However, if we invest $1 trillion a year to over the next decade we will be investing 1% of our economy to fill this gap and this investment will ultimately save more than it will cost, so today I am faced with to promise you that we will continue to innovate in cutting-edge battery technologies, discovering new ways to invent chemicals. new ecological manufacturing processes.

I promise you that you will see an incredible transformation in the variety and flexibility of batteries in your daily life. We must inspire and train the next generation to

make

this transformation happen faster, just as I ask the hundreds of my students and postdocs we must ask the growing generation of scientists and innovators to keep innovating, keep collaborating, keep running a good race for

better

batteries, do not stop until you reach the end of the destination, which is a world where renewable energy powers our lives, where sustainability is the basis of our existence and where we can transmit a healthier and more prosperous planet to future generations , we have only one planet, the Earth, it is our responsibility to protect it, thank you all.