West LA Times

Three faculty members from UCLA are contributing to a U.S. Department of Energy-funded project aimed at developing advanced batteries for grid-scale energy storage. This initiative supports sustainable energy sources like solar and wind, which are often inconsistent.

The Aqueous Battery Consortium, headquartered at Stanford University and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, includes 31 leading experts in energy storage technology from 15 research institutions across the U.S. and Canada. UCLA is set to receive $4.73 million over nearly four and a half years from the DOE's five-year, $62.5 million award.

The UCLA team is co-led by Sarah Tolbert, Bruce Dunn, and Yuzhang Li, all prominent figures in their respective fields at UCLA and members of the California NanoSystems Institute.

The consortium was launched on September 3 as part of the DOE’s Innovation Hubs program, which aims to tackle significant challenges in energy science through collaboration. The group focuses on creating battery chemistries using nontoxic oxides found naturally in water and earth to meet global grid-scale energy storage needs.

Their ultimate goal is to aid electricity systems in achieving net-zero carbon emissions.

For more information about the consortium, visit the UCLA Samueli website.