George Crabtree, director of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research at Argonne and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is fondly remembered for his impactful leadership that elevated energy research.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm honored 44 teams with the Secretary of Energy Achievement Award and five individuals for their work. Among the recipients are Distinguished Professor Esther Takeuchi, a battery researcher with a joint appointment at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University; Douglas Paquette, a hydrogeologist in Brookhaven Lab's Environmental Protection Division; and Robert Gordon, manager of the DOE-Brookhaven Site Office that oversees operations at Brookhaven Lab.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Technology Transitions and Office of Science today jointly released a request for information (RFI) to strengthen place-based innovation activities by leveraging DOE national laboratories, plants, and sites for the benefit of the American people.
Michigan State University researchers have solved a puzzle that could help switchgrass realize its full potential as a low-cost, sustainable biofuel crop and curb our dependence on fossil fuels.
A new hybrid catalyst converts carbon dioxide into ethylene in one pot. The catalyst was developed by scientists from Ames National Laboratory, Iowa State University, University of Virginia, and Columbia University.
KIMM has announced the development of the design and process technology for the world's first battery electrode that significantly improves the performance and stability of batteries used in electronic devices such as smartphones, laptops, and electric vehicles.
A regional partnership that aims to attract nuclear energy-related firms to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, has been recognized with a state and local economic development award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $125 million for basic research on rechargeable batteries to provide foundational knowledge needed to transform and decarbonize our energy system through the development and adoption of cost-effective and clean energy sources. The national, economic, and environmental security challenges will not be met solely by incremental improvements to existing clean energy technologies but instead will require transformational technologies founded on new fundamental knowledge and capabilities developed through basic scientific research.
As lithium-ion batteries have become a ubiquitous part of our lives through their use in consumer electronics, automobiles and electricity storage facilities, researchers have been working to improve their power, efficiency and longevity. As detailed in a paper published today in Nature Materials, scientists at the University of California, Irvine and Brookhaven National Laboratory conducted a detailed examination of high-nickel-content layered cathodes, considered to be components of promise in next-generation batteries.
Fans of science history can now access a new gem: a 20-minute video interview with the father of the Big Bang theory, Georges Lemaître. European broadcast network VRT found the 20-minute recording that is thought to be the only video of Lemaître. His interview, originally aired in 1964 and conducted in French, has now been transcribed and translated into English by physicists at Berkeley Lab and the Vatican Observatory.
In a new pilot run by Cornell and NYSEG, participants will pay a flat rate for their electricity bill and use an app that provides information about how to reduce electricity use and costs.
Today the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that will continue a longstanding collaboration on scientific and engineering research and enable increased partnership to address the most important challenges of the 21st century.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $105 million for research in biopreparedness. This funding, provided by the Office of Science, will support fundamental research to accelerate breakthroughs in support of the Biopreparedness Research Virtual Environment (BRaVE) initiative.
A new study by world leaders in patent data has revealed some unusual trends in energy tech R&D, questioning whether companies are more committed to extracting fossil fuels or in pursuing genuinely ‘green’, renewable energy technologies.
Scientists have taken the first step at estimating the best large-scale uses for food processing waste, first analyzing its contents and, based on those findings, proposing production opportunities ranging from sustainable fuels, biogas and electricity to useful chemicals and organic fertilizer.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) initiated the competition for the management and operating (M&O) contract for the Fermi National Acceleratory Laboratory (FNAL).
Graduate student intern Meg Slattery is working with researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Lithium Resource Research and Innovation Center to develop a new research blueprint – inspired by energy justice – as they explore the Salton Sea’s potential as a renewable source of lithium for battery production.
The Department of Energy’s Center for Bioenergy Innovation, led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, recently added three new members to its board of directors: Deborah Crawford of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Susan Hubbard of ORNL; and Maureen McCann of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
The University of Texas at El Paso signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory to create new research opportunities for UTEP faculty and students as well as internship and employment opportunities in critical fields such as energy, data science and quantum information.
A research team has improved the solar energy absorption of titanium oxo clusters. Their work demonstrates an effective strategy for regulating the light absorption behaviors of these clusters by importing electron-rich heterometals.
Careful siting of renewable energy development seems to play a key role in minimizing impacts to wildlife, but this requires detailed knowledge of where animals breed, winter, and migrate. To address this need, BRI established a wildlife and renewable energy program in 2009, which has evolved over the past 12 years into BRI’s Center for Research on Offshore Wind and the Environment (CROWE).
KRISS has succeeded in developing a high-performance energy analyzer, which is a key technology for determining the performance of electron microscopes.
Beginning in January, the Urban Future Lab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, in partnership with Greentown Labs, will provide a soft landing pad in the U.S. for the third cohort of Innovate UK’s Global Incubator Programme: Clean Growth edition, which is designed to cultivate and support the launch of innovative climatetech companies with a strong potential to scale internationally to new markets.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $200 million for Energy Earthshot Research Centers (EERCs). This funding, provided by the Office of Science, will support fundamental research to accelerate breakthroughs in support of the Energy Earthshots Initiative.
Scientists have found a variety of ways to convert one color of laser light into another. In a study just published in the journal Physical Review Applied, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory demonstrate a new color-shifting strategy that’s simple, efficient, and highly customizable.
A leading laboratory in photonics and renewable energy at the University of Ottawa has developed a new method for measuring the solar energy produced by bifacial solar panels, the double-sided solar technology which is expected to meet increased global energy demands moving forward.
Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the Dark Energy Camera, built by the US Department of Energy, at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science (SC) will support nearly 100 high schoolers, recent high school graduates, and early undergraduate students from underrepresented groups and underserved schools in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) through awards for five Pathway Summer Schools at six national laboratories. The funding comes from SC’s Reaching a New Energy Sciences Workforce (RENEW) initiative (see details at https://science.osti.gov/initiatives/RENEW). Sponsored by the Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists (WDTS), the WDTS RENEW Pathway Summer Schools aim to diversify the STEM pipeline via hands-on learning opportunities at DOE national laboratories.
A collaboration led by scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the Max Born Institute (MBI) published a study in Nature in which they used a novel analysis technique—called coherent correlation imaging (CCI)—to image the evolution of magnetic domains in time and space without any previous knowledge. The scientists could not see the “dance of the domains” during the measurement but only afterward, when they used the recorded data to “rewind the tape.”
Researchers have been looking to replace silicon in electronics with materials that provide a higher performance and lower power consumption while also having scalability. An international team is addressing that need by developing a promising process to develop high-quality 2D materials that could power next-generation electronics.
A Missouri University of Science and Technology team of researchers led by Dr. Rui Bo, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, recently took second place in the Hydropower Operations Optimization (H2Os) Prize challenge sponsored by the United States Department of Energy (DOE).
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $2.3 million in funding for 10 projects that will pair private industry with DOE’s National Laboratories to overcome challenges in fusion energy development, an area of research that captivated global attention in December when the Department announced that a team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had achieved fusion ignition. Ignition, in which more energy was derived from fusion than was put into it, had never been accomplished before in a laboratory setting and raised hopes that fusion energy could play a major role in the transition to clean energy.
Nuclear and hydrogen could be the ideal fuel for recharging electric trucks, opening potential markets for developers of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs).
Synthetic energy carriers are carbon-neutral and make renewable energy transportable and storable in the long term. Synthetically produced methane is one of them. The problem: The production involves rather high energy losses; moreover, existing processes require the methane to be purified. To change this, Empa researchers have developed a new, optimized reactor concept for methanation.
Heat and drought are the utmost limiting abiotic factors which pose a major threat to food security and agricultural production and are exacerbated by ‘extreme and rapid’ climate change, according to a new paper in CABI Reviews.
In the future, the energy needed to run the powerful computers on board a global fleet of autonomous vehicles could generate as many greenhouse gas emissions as all the data centers in the world today.
Flow batteries offer a solution. Electrolytes flow through electrochemical cells from storage tanks in this rechargeable battery. The existing flow battery technologies cost more than $200/kilowatt hour and are too expensive for practical application, but Liu’s lab in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) developed a more compact flow battery cell configuration that reduces the size of the cell by 75%, and correspondingly reduces the size and cost of the entire flow battery. The work could revolutionize how everything from major commercial buildings to residential homes are powered.
Half a million lives could be saved each year in sub-Saharan Africa by taking action to reduce reliance on traditional wood- and charcoal-burning stoves, a new study shows.
A novel technique called Underground Gravity Energy Storage turns decommissioned mines into long-term energy storage solutions, thereby supporting the sustainable energy transition.
Journalists who register for the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) will have access to more than 10,000 presentations on topics. ACS Spring 2023 is a hybrid meeting being held virtually and in-person in Indianapolis on March 26-30 with the theme “Crossroads of Chemistry.”
Plant biochemists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered a new level of regulation in the biochemical “machinery” that plants use to convert organic carbon derived from photosynthesis into a range of ring-shaped aromatic molecules. The research suggests new strategies for controlling plant biochemistry for agricultural and industrial applications.
Lignin, the complex polymer that gives plants their structural integrity, makes them difficult to break down and creates challenges for the creation of biochemicals and bioproducts. Building blocks that are present in small amounts in the lignin of the bioenergy crop poplar are valuable platform chemicals that are easy to “clip-off” during plant deconstruction. Scientists engineered a new type of poplar to have more of a specific building block in its lignin and less lignin overall. This results in wood that is easier to deconstruct and more valuable as a bioproduct raw material.
An update to the Energy Zones Mapping Tool, the Geospatial Energy Mapper is an online tool with an extensive catalog of mapping data for energy planning. It can help identify areas that are suitable for clean energy infrastructure projects.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced awards totaling $17 million for small businesses in 25 states. The 77 projects are in the fields of advanced scientific computing and scientific instrumentation that support DOE’s clean energy mission.