Technologies under development in NIMS: batteries

Our team has as task to help determine which future research directions and technology developments could be necessary and promising if we are to reach a society with 80% or more greenhouse gas emission reduction. To achieve this task, we coordinate with other GREEN team leaders and investigate current research projects at NIMS. Regarding energy storage, two types of batteries are being developed at NIMS, namely lithium air batteries, and all solid state batteries. 

You may have heard of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that you find in mobile phones and laptop computers. They often rely on expensive metals like cobalt for the positive electrode and cheaper graphite for the negative electrode. A lithium air battery uses a simpler chemistry of lithium and oxygen and could be developed to be cheaper, and they have 5-15 times more energy per unit mass (also known as specific energy) than lithium ion batteries, which makes them highly sought out in the automobile industry. Under the leadership of Yoshimi Kubo, the lithium air battery team at NIMS is aiming to develop a battery with the highest energy density possible. 

Kazunori Takada leads the NIMS research team on all solid state batteries. They are developing batteries with higher energy densities than those obtainable with lithium ion batteries. Solid state batteries have a solid electrolyte and thus do not leak, and they can be made to be ultra thin, with finished products of only several mm thick. 

This short investigation in NIMS' technologies currently under development has taught me that batteries for mass storage of energy are nowhere near where we would like them to be. While there are billions of batteries in the world, they are often small, and have either little power stored in them (energy density) or a low capability of transferring energy (power density). For a sustainable energy supply, we need to develop more energy storage options with high energy and power density that allow capturing and transferring the intermittently produced energy from renewable sources such as solar, wind, and hydro.