Prof. Fikile R Brushett

Advancing Grid-Connected Electrochemical Energy Storage Through Cost-Constrained Design

Electrochemical energy storage is emerging as a critical technology to enable sustainable electricity generation by alleviating intermittency from renewable sources, reducing transmission congestion, enhancing grid resiliency, and decoupling generation from demand. While several different rechargeable batteries have been proposed for and demonstrated in these applications, further cost reductions are needed for ubiquitous adoption. As such, recent research has focused on the discovery and development of new chemistries. Though exciting, most of these emerging concepts only consider new materials in isolation rather than as part of a battery system. Understanding the critical relationships between materials properties and overall battery price is key to enabling systematic improvements. In this presentation, I will discuss an approach to mapping feasible design spaces for incipient energy storage systems through techno-economic modeling and to using this knowledge to identify critical pathways at an early stage in the research and development process. While redox flow batteries will be used as an exemplar technology, the methods to be described here are applicable to a wide range of electrochemical systems and envisioned applications.

2018 MIT Research and Development Conference