DOE seeks batteries with four times the juice

If lithium-ion batteries are “miraculous,” as one science writer called them, the Energy Department is looking to fund a quadruple miracle. 

The department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy office is giving six teams up to $15 million to produce prototypes of manufacturable next-generation energy storage within two years. 

“We want to develop a system, a battery system or an energy system, that has four times the energy density of lithium ion batteries that we have today,” said James Seaba, program director at Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E.

If successful, the technology could enable military drones, robots, and aircraft of far greater capability and use. 

Scientists have long looked for ways to extend battery life, but the ARPA-E program aims to produce leapfrog tech within 24 months. The effort, dubbed the Jumpstart Opportunities to Unleash Leadership in Energy Storage with 1K Energy Storage Systems, or JOULES-1K, started 18 months ago with a baker’s dozen of teams. Now, just six “performers” will move into its second phase to develop working prototypes. 

In the $16.9-million Phase 1, teams “proved out the chemistry, for example…or parts of the system,” Seaba said. Now, “they have to be able to deliver a system by the end of Phase 2 that we consider scalable.” 

Batteries have become indispensable on the battlefield, powering troop-carried systems, drones, and more. But many are made of materials and components from China—which is working on next-gen batteries of its own—and so the Pentagon is seeking new energy-storage technologies that can be made closer to home.

One of the JOULES-1K performers, Silicon Valley-based startup And Battery Aero, is getting around $4 million to prove out its high-energy battery tech, which is focused on the needs of drones.

“We have multiple commercial drone partners with whom we’re going to integrate our energy storage solution into. And then demonstrate this improved endurance, payload, range combination,” Venkat Viswanathan, the company’s founder and a University of Michigan aerospace engineering professor, told Defense One. 

Viswanathan said the company’s approach increased energy density by about 25 percent in a previous ARPA-E program.

“We had a chemistry innovation, we had a material science innovation, we scaled it up, and then we integrated that into a packaged energy storage solution, and then integrated it into drones,” he said. 

The next two years will be about getting to that first flight. 

“There’s nothing like that first demonstration flight,” he said. “All of these kinds of scientific advances face scaling challenges. And we know that it’s real. And so I think we have our work cut out for the next 24 months.”

Other teams competing hail from Johns Hopkins University, University of Maryland – College Park, Illinois Institute of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Connecticut-based Precision Combustion.