Inside Berkeley Lab: Better Batteries for Transportation

Vince Battaglia leads a behind-the-scenes tour of Berkeley Lab's BATT, the Batteries for Advanced Transportation Technologies Program, where researchers aim to improve batteries upon which the range, efficiency, and power of tomorrow's electric cars will depend.

Transcript

00:00:04 hi I'm Vince pagley I work here at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the battery research program I specifically work on lithium ion batteries supported by the department of energy and the batteries for advanced Transportation Technologies program we're uh supported to do research for batteries for electric vehicles like the one I'm driving now this is the uh gem

00:00:24 car and it's run on lead acid batteries it'll probably go about 50 m in this thing before it has to be charged again and most consumers aren't happy with that type of product and so the department of energy is supporting research to develop uh Advanced Technologies like lithium ion so that we can go 150 maybe up to even 300 miles in a

00:00:46 vehicle we're working specifically at high energy density batteries a lot a lot like the batteries that in the uh camcorders and uh cell phones but the problem with those batteries is that they don't last long and so not only we're trying to make those batteries themselves better we're trying to make them last 15 years instead of perhaps the 3 years you're accustomed to and

00:01:06 what is that going to do if we can make a bar less like that we're going to put it in a vehicle because Vehicles last 10 to 15 years and if we can do that we can reduce the cost of that vehicle so that everyone can drive them so now we're in our cell analysis facility here you'll see over 250 channels able to cycle 250 batteries at a time now some of the things we test here are some of the most

00:01:27 advanced materials that are being developed across the country uh not only in Laboratories but also in Industry so that we can compare our materials the the materials being developed here at Berkeley as well as some of the the leading universities in this country and seeing how they're doing against these baselines and how well we're advancing the technology so

00:01:46 here at Berkeley lab I'm one of many scientists postdocs graduate students and professors working together in some of the greatest facilities in the world on a lithium ion technology for the next generation of electric vehicles which we think is then next steps through a sustainable Transportation infrastructure