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Energy Technologies Area (ETA) researchers are continually building on the strong scientific foundation we have developed over the past 50 years. We address the world’s most pressing climate challenges by bringing to market energy-efficient innovations across the buildings, transportation, and industrial sectors. ETA is at the forefront of developing better batteries for electric vehicles; improving the country's aging electrical grid and innovating distributed energy and storage solutions; developing grid-interactive, efficient buildings; and providing the most comprehensive market and data analysis worldwide for renewable technologies like wind and solar.
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The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) Strategic Plan is the guiding force for our research and development for the next ten years. It clearly charts a path toward clean-energy solutions and focuses on five detailed Strategic Initiatives. The Plan provides an in-depth look at how ETA is accelerating research to provide affordable, clean energy to all while accomplishing deep, economy-wide decarbonization, looking to avoid a rise in global average temperature while simultaneously developing solutions to increase humanity's resilience to extreme weather volatility.
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The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) is unique in translating fundamental scientific discoveries into scalable technology adoption. Our approach combines an understanding of the marketplace and the role of state and federal regulation and policies. ETA's research drives real-world, practical results that affect and improve the everyday lives of Americans and those across the globe. Saving energy and battling the Climate Crisis are key to the foundation of our research, which is driven by technoeconomic analysis and in-lab experimentation and discovery.

New Spectroscopic Technique Reveals the Dynamics of Operating Battery Electrodes

January 29, 2014

The following story appears on the website of Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source. Three of the scientists involved in this research are based in Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division.

Developing high-performance batteries relies on material breakthroughs. During the past few years, various in situ characterization tools have been developed and have become indispensable in studying and the eventual optimization of battery materials. However, soft x-ray spectroscopy, one of the most sensitive probes of electronic states, has been mainly limited to ex situ experiments for battery research.

Recent ALS work could change this trend. Researchers have developed a new technique based on soft x-ray spectroscopy that could help scientists better understand and improve the materials required for high-performance lithium-ion batteries. The technique measures something never seen before: the migration of ions and electrons in an integrated, operating battery electrode.

Over the past few years, scientists have developed several ways to study the changes in a working electrode. These include techniques based on hard x-rays, electron microscopy, neutron scattering, and nuclear magnetic resonance imaging. But most of these methods track structural changes. They don't track electron and ion dynamics directly, which is very important in the push to understand and optimize battery performance.

Read the rest at the link below.