Lab Partnering Service Discovery

The U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, located outside of Chicago, and California Lithium Battery, Inc. (CalBattery), a Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator portfolio company, announced today that they have signed a licensing agreement for an Argonne-developed, silicon-graphene composite anode material for high-energy lithium batteries.

CalBattery plans to move forward rapidly in the commercial scale-up and production of this breakthrough novel composite anode material, which tests show triples the energy capacity of the state-of-the-art graphite anode.

CalBattery has worked with Argonne for more than a year under a Work for Others agreement to develop the technology under the DOE's Startup America program, which is part of a White House initiative to inspire and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship.

Vorbeck Materials Corp of Jessup, MD participated in the America’s Next Top Energy Innovator program, a part of the Startup America initiative, allowing the company to quickly and efficiently license a substantial portfolio of graphene-based battery technologies, developed with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Princeton University.  

 PNNL and Princeton's pioneering work in the field of graphene-based battery electrodes, together with Vorbeck's leading expertise in the production and application of high-quality graphene, will enable the rapid commercialization of this energy storage technology. Vorbeck is already working with materials distribution and supply company, Targray Technology International, to bring the novel battery electrode materials to market.

Google and the IEEE Power Electronics Society are working with NREL at the ESIF on the Little Box Challenge, an open competition challenging engineers to build smaller power inverters for use in photovoltaic (PV) power systems.

R&D STRATEGY

Up to 18 finalists in the Challenge will be invited to bring their inverter to the ESIF in 2015 for testing and evaluation against the contest parameters. NREL’s world-class researchers will use the state-of-the-art capabilities of the ESIF to evaluate each inverter’s efficiency and performance during tests spanning 100 hours under the same set of typical operating conditions. The test results will help Google and IEEE decide the winner of the $1 million prize, which in 2016 will go to the team that designs and builds a kilowatt-scale inverter with the highest power density and that meets the contest’s other specifications.

IMPACT

The goal of the Little Box Challenge is to create a smaller,more efficient power inverter. Currently, inverters are about the size of a picnic cooler, and Google would like to see the technology shrink to the size of a small laptop computer or smaller. Shrinking the current inverter by 10 times or more and making it cheaper to produce and install would enable more PV-powered homes and more efficient distribution grids, and help bring electricity to remote areas.