A key focus of the consortium is to ensure the technological solutions it develops meet the needs of automotive and battery manufacturers. Consortium members will work to ensure significant innovations can be quickly and seamlessly implemented by industry throughout the project.

The Battery500 consortium will receive up to $10 million a year over five years from the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The multi-disciplinary consortium includes leaders from DOE national labs, universities and industry, all of which are working together to make smaller, lighter and less expensive batteries that can be adopted by manufacturers.

Beyond PNNL, the consortium includes the following partners:

• Brookhaven National Laboratory
• Idaho National Laboratory
• SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
• Binghamton University (State University of New York)
• Stanford University
• University of California, San Diego
• University of Texas at Austin
• University of Washington
• IBM (advisory board member)

Recognizing diversity in experience and opinions often results in better solutions, the consortium will also welcome ideas from others. The team will set aside 20% of its overall budget for “seedling projects,” or work based on proposals from throughout the battery research community.

Though the immediate goal is to make effective, affordable batteries for EVs, consortium director and PNNL materials scientist Jun Liu expects the consortium’s work could also advance stationary grid energy storage.

Battery500 is also expected to take advantage of DOE facilities, including the fabrication equipment at PNNL’s Advanced Battery Facility and materials characterization instruments at EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a DOE Office of Science User Facility on PNNL’s campus. PNNL’s lead role in the consortium builds on its decades of leadership in materials science, chemistry, transportation and power grid modernization.