Batteries are the 'holy grail' for transitioning to clean energy but development is slow

If renewable energy has matured into a stable family of industries, battery storage technology might be seen as the awkward adolescent of the bunch, hitting a growth spurt but still viewed skeptically by investors.

Despite excitement about the development of large-scale batteries as the “holy grail” for transitioning the power grid to a clean energy future, the technology for now remains out of reach. 

“There has been a lot of investment,” said Prashant Kumta, a University of Pittsburgh engineering professor who leads research on battery storage and materials science. “But if you look at the success, it’s not commensurate with the amount of investment.” 

Mr. Kumta hopes that will change this fall when the school will uproot his laboratory on the eighth floor of Benedum Hall on Pitt’s campus and move it into a space twice as big — a 3,040-square-foot section of the Energy Innovation Center, the re-purposed former Connelley Trade School on Bedford Avenue in the Lower Hill District. 

More room to work and increased visibility are the most noticeable perks of the 200,000-square-foot center. Because the center was built off-campus without the use of tax-free bonds, it’s also easier for researchers to give companies access to their work and become familiar with it at early stages.

This is a big deal because academic researchers may have a hard time pitching their ideas to investors. 

“Companies are skeptical of everything,” said Mr. Kumta, who has been working in battery technology since the early-1990s. “They won’t believe a university technology out there is real unless they look into it themselves.”  

Explosive growth

Battery technology has ballooned with the need to store large amounts of power generated by intermittent sources — wind and solar generators that produce power when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. Homes and businesses, for example, can send power from their rooftop solar systems into a battery and draw from it when needed.

The principle is the same for utilities and electric grid operators, which try to smooth out the flow of power between power plants and large swaths of service territory. 

In 2015, developers installed 221 megawatts of battery capacity, nearly four times as much capacity as in the year before, according to GreenTech Media, a research firm that tracks growth in clean energy technology.

Last week, the Energy Storage Association, a Washington, D.C., trade group, launched a weeklong social media marketing campaign called #StorageIsHere. It held a Twitter session to answer questions about the technology and shared examples of successful installations. The point is to correct a misconception that storage technology is years away from commercialization, said Matt Roberts, executive director of the group.

“We just wanted to make a splash and show people that it is here today, and it’s providing value,” Mr. Roberts said. 

Reaching commercialization

The reality is that each line of research approaches energy storage from different sides. In Pittsburgh, Jay Whitacre, a professor of materials science and engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, spun out Aquion Energy from the school in 2009. The private Lawrenceville-based company manufactures sodium-ion batteries and energy storage systems. 

Addressing CMU’s Energy Week conference last month, Mr. Whitacre said there’s not much more room for a battery’s price to come down. The goal is to increase the lifetime of a battery to amortize the investment over a longer period of time and make the customer’s investment worth it. 

Because Aquion’s saltwater battery is naturally corrosive, the company is studying how to coat the cubes that form the electrode with polymers that protect them from corrosion, he said. 

“The near-term energy storage solution won’t be significantly less expensive,” he said. “So we have to increase the lifetime.”

At Mr. Kumta’s lab, a team of graduate students is experimenting with a flexible material to hold energy. During a tour last week, students manufactured flexible anodes using silicon as the active material and produced sulfur wires.

Combining both components to make a complete flexible battery system, it will be capable of delivering about 900 watt-hours per kilogram — a common measure of energy density that shows power held for each unit of mass — which is at least 4 times higher than current battery systems.

“It is therefore definitely viable but needs some more research and engineering,” Mr. Kumta said. With industry support at the Energy Innovation Center, this should be possible in about a year or two, he said. 

Hits and misses

New Castle-based Axion Power Inc., a manufacturer of lead-carbon batteries, is among those companies that have struggled with attracting lasting investment. Though the company did not respond to requests for comment, financial filings show it has watched promising partnerships develop slowly or crumble altogether.

Axion has marketed its battery as especially useful for electric and hybrid vehicles, and the company in 2010 struck a deal with Norfolk Southern Corp. to test its battery in locomotives to help reduce emissions. The effort came to fruition in 2015, according to a company presentation, and although the battery itself functioned, the locomotives experienced “several electronic system errors.” Norfolk Southern declined to comment on the deal. 

Perhaps Axion’s most ambitious deal to date involved sending 100 batteries to Chinese firm LCB International Inc. for testing and development. In a letter of intent signed in June, Axion received $250,000 in earnest money from LCB and expected further payments after a final agreement. 

But by October, the deal fell apart, and Axion Chairman Donald Farley blamed LCB for backing away from the terms of the deal, according to a letter to shareholders. 

The company has reported widening losses in recent years, reporting a nearly $19 million loss in 2014. Just more than a year after going public, Axion voluntarily removed itself in February from the Nasdaq stock exchange for falling below the minimum of $2.5 million in stockholders’ equity. 

Still, the company forges ahead, announcing in March that it supplied batteries for the construction of an off-grid system to power a facility for Urban Green Lab, a nonprofit based in Nashville, Tenn. In a statement, CEO Richard Bogan said the deal had been two years in the making.

“We will use the experience … to further demonstrate uses for our technology,” he said. “The lab debuted in February and has already been used as a platform for green technology education in workshops at schools, businesses and public events in the Nashville area.”

Daniel Moore: dmoore@post-gazette.com, 412-263-2743 and Twitter @PGdanielmoore. Anya Litvak contributed reporting. 

Join the conversation:

Batteries are the "holy grail" for transitioning to clean energy but development is slow