PNNL

Energy storage is increasingly critical to building a resilient electric grid in the United States—a trend embodied by the Grid Storage Launchpad (GSL), a newly inaugurated, 93,000-square-foot facility at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).

GSL is a hub for propelling energy storage technologies out of the lab and into the real world: a perfect fit for PNNL, where decades of targeted innovation have positioned the Laboratory as a leader in energy storage research. GSL reinforces and elevates that position, bringing many of PNNL’s energy storage research programs under one roof while adding new testing, production, and development capabilities.

Validating and testing more, bigger, and better batteries

Grid batteries face challenging requirements: charging and discharging quickly, operating continuously for long periods of time, enduring constant cycling for years—and, of course, holding enough energy to make a difference to today’s electric grid. 

Validating these properties is crucial when developing experimental grid storage technologies. Previously, PNNL had the ability to test batteries at a 5–10 kW scale—about the power provided by a mid-tier electric vehicle (EV) charger or the average power draw of a handful of typical homes.

That capability is increasing by an order of magnitude: GSL has the ability to test and validate much more powerful systems (up to 100 kW) with capacities up to 400 kWh—enough to power several homes for days or even weeks. This increase in power and scale, combined with the realistic grid operating conditions used to test these batteries, will help to derisk adoption and acceleration commercialization of grid-scale energy storage.

The smaller-scale testing capability is also getting a boost. Now called the 10 kW Reliability Test Laboratory, the new, 6,000-square-foot space allows researchers to run more concurrent tests at the 10 kW scale than ever before, helping to identify potential issues sooner for more technologies.

For many battery technologies, promising materials are often first tested in an easy-to-manufacture coin cell—like those found in watches—followed by a larger pouch cell, like those found in power tools and some EVs. GSL adds more lab space for coin cell and pouch cell production and testing, empowering PNNL to simultaneously test more prototype batteries.

But GSL also houses a major new capability: a production line for prismatic cells, which offer higher power and energy capacity than pouch cells and can be used to enable EV (and grid) battery configurations that pack a bigger punch with fewer cells. Thanks to the prismatic cell line—a capability unique to PNNL among the national laboratories—the Laboratory will be able to manufacture, test, and validate the most industrially relevant form factors for batteries.

Accelerating and advancing materials development

“Going back decades, PNNL has always had an extremely strong materials science expertise,” said Vince Sprenkle, director of GSL. That background, he explained, was what enabled PNNL to pursue energy storage research as a priority.

Over the years, PNNL has leveraged its strengths in materials sciences to explore diverse and experimental battery chemistries, from sodium-ion and redox flow grid batteries to lithium-metal and lithium-sulfur vehicle batteries.

Now? It’s time to accelerate.

GSL is the new home of PNNL’s Automated Robotics for Energy Storage (ARES) Lab, which uses robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) to dramatically accelerate the pace of materials discovery for energy storage. 

“Traditionally, the research and development workflow has been trial and error,” explained Wei Wang, deputy director of the new Energy Storage Research Alliance—an Energy Innovation Hub funded by the Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences program—and director of PNNL’s Energy Storage Materials Initiative from 2019 to 2024. “A human needs to be involved in every decision. If we wanted to measure the solubility of a molecule, for instance, a human would need to add material to the liquid, shake it, eyeball it to look for precipitation, adjust as necessary, and repeat.”

In GSL, ARES can do all of that, leveraging machine-learning-enabled cameras to image and analyze the solution, then using the robotic arms to shake and modify it, as necessary. 

This, of course, is just one example. Once an experiment is designed and tested, ARES can autonomously run that experiment 24/7—and with far greater consistency and precision than a human. The experiments can also now leverage conditions inhospitable to humans, such as extreme cold or extreme heat.

But even ARES is only the tip of the iceberg.

“The robotics collect large amounts of data, and we have a lot of new research in the machine learning and AI space that needs the data,” Wang said. “This is a very effective way to build those datasets.”

Using that data, PNNL researchers are working to build a battery digital twin—an AI-augmented 1:1 simulation of a real-world battery that could be used to predict the performance of experimental battery chemistries in different settings and over long periods of time. The digital twin would help to identify promising or flawed chemistries earlier, compressing some years-long processes into a few months.

“We have the materials development expertise—now, we’re looking to the future,” Sprenkle said. “We’re focused on what we can do with machine learning to truly shorten the time of discovery.”

That emphasis on advanced materials evaluation stretches across GSL. The facility also hosts a scanning transmission electron microscope that will allow researchers to observe battery materials at the atomic scale before and after cycling.

These capabilities—and the ability to robustly analyze and predict battery materials’ performance at the outset—will have implications across the battery development cycle at PNNL. 

“There’s now an opportunity to evaluate battery safety profiles at the materials level,” said Matt Paiss, a technical adviser in PNNL’s Battery Materials & Systems group. “We don’t have to wait until after scale-up—we can make sure that safety is part of the initial evaluation of a new battery material.”

Collaborating in a new hub for battery research

As battery research at PNNL ramped up over the years, researchers, programs, and laboratories made homes one by one—so, by 2024, there were more than two dozen different battery research spaces scattered across PNNL’s campus.

GSL brings many of those spaces under one roof, making it far easier for researchers on different projects to talk and collaborate. “The opportunity to directly interact with the experts who operate these pieces of equipment, I think, will help our material synthesis efficiency improve,” said Cassidy Anderson, a materials scientist at PNNL.

GSL will offer greater opportunities for external collaboration, as well, serving as a national hub for the Department of Energy to work alongside research institutions and industry partners to address a range of energy storage challenges. 

For some partners, these opportunities will make a big difference.

“There are a lot of smaller groups that do not have the equipment or the space to go beyond some initial cell development,” Paiss said, highlighting how PNNL could now help to scale up innovative materials from such groups.

Educating and training the next generation of battery professionals

GSL will also serve as a hub for a wide range of battery education and training.

“We’re looking to have programs on safety, on battery basics, and more,” Paiss said. “The people that will benefit from these are safety professionals, from emergency responders and code officials to fire protection engineers and design engineers.”

Beyond safety, GSL will also help to train battery researchers present and future, from students to industry partners—and everyone in between.

“Two of the new lab spaces in GSL have been set up specifically for training the current and next-generation workforce, from battery basics and energy storage safety to showing how utility planning models can accurately model storage’s impacts on the grid,” Sprenkle said.

“Learning how to build a battery is in-house, on-the-job training,” Paiss added. “There isn’t an established curriculum for that kind of expertise.”

… and beyond

Now open, GSL—which already houses 30 specialty laboratories and around 100 researchers—is buzzing with activity as the final pieces of new equipment are brought online and researchers begin working in their new spaces.

“This is an all-in-one research facility,” Wang said. “You can do your materials research here, scale it up, create a system, and test it in a real environment. Then, it’s no longer just a lab-generated technology: it’s a technology that’s been scaled up to industrial relevance and tested under real operating environments.”

The Grid Storage Launchpad was funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity, with additional funding from the state of Washington, Battelle, and PNNL.