Understanding the risk of compound energy droughts—times when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow—will help grid planners understand where energy storage is needed most.
Floating offshore wind farms could potentially triple the Pacific Northwest's wind power capacity while offsetting billions of dollars in costs for utilities, ratepayers, insurance companies, and others.
Rechargeable battery performance could be improved by a new understanding of how batteries work at the molecular level. Researchers at PNNL upend what's known about how rechargeable batteries function.
A new sodium battery technology shows promise for helping integrate renewable energy into the electric grid. The battery uses Earth-abundant raw materials such as aluminum and sodium.
PNNL scientists carve a path to profit from carbon capture by creating a system that efficiently captures CO2 and converts it into one of the world’s most widely used chemicals: methanol.
A new discovery simultaneously reduces the need for rare and expensive platinum and improves its ability to speed up economically important chemical reactions.
Plastic upcycling efficiently converts plastics to valuable commodity chemicals while using less of the precious metal ruthenium. The method could recycle waste plastic pollution into useful products, helping keep it out of landfills.
An innovative artificial enzyme has shown it can chew through woody lignin, an abundant carbon-based substance that stores tremendous potential for renewable energy and materials.