The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) will begin designing and building a $75 million facility in Eastern Washington that will help develop massive batteries for grid energy storage.
On Wednesday, Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm gave departmental approval of the project, allowing an initiative nearly two years in the works to start taking shape.
PNNL was chosen in August 2019 as the site of the national grid energy research facility, named the Grid Storage Launchpad. Congress had allocated $28 million for the project over the past two years. Granholm’s announcement will unlock those dollars.
Energy grids — the essential infrastructure that carries power from the sites where it’s generated to where it’s consumed — tend to get less attention than the coal power plants and solar arrays that produce electricity. But the grid was headline news recently when severe weather led to rolling blackouts in Texas, leaving swaths of the state without power during freezing temperatures. A winter storm caused failures at natural gas, coal and nuclear power facilities as well as wind and solar power sites, while at the same time power demand was spiking.
“Accelerating the development of energy storage technologies is fundamental to the transition to a cleaner and more diverse electricity grid. By manufacturing and deploying these technologies here at home we will reduce energy costs, create jobs and help keep the lights on during extreme weather emergencies,” said Sen. Maria Cantwell in a statement.
The Washington senator called on Granholm to take action on the launchpad during the energy secretary’s confirmation hearing in January.
DOE emphasizes three goals for the launchpad: facilitating collaboration between between government, academia and industry; allowing researchers to test and validate promising battery materials using real-world simulations; and accelerating the time from bench top to application of new energy storage technologies.
Details on the Grid Storage Launchpad:
- The approximately 85,000-square-foot facility will be part of PNNL’s Richland, Wash., campus. It will house 30 research laboratories and 100 employees.
- The DOE says the building will be completed by 2025, while Cantwell’s office says it could be ready by 2023 “if Congress approves the balance of the funding.”
- PNNL is selecting the design and construction contractor, and building could begin later this year.
- The facility will play a role in the DOE’s Energy Storage Grand Challenge. The initiative is using R&D funding, prizes and partnerships to try to create a domestic battery industry by 2030.
Dan Schwartz, director of the University of Washington’s Clean Energy Institute, cheered the news, calling PNNL a “genuine leader in grid engineering” and saying that the UW looks forward to collaborations at the new site.
“The clean energy revolution is happening and as we get more and more penetration of renewables… we need more clean, dispatchable sources of energy,” Schwartz said.
Those dispatchable sources include batteries that are part of the grid and can provide power when renewable sources such as wind and solar aren’t available.
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PNNL and the Pacific Northwest more broadly are leaders in battery innovation, and Washington state officials have taken steps to foster this piece of the energy sector locally. The state’s Department of Commerce, for example, has pledged $8.3 million toward the Grid Storage Launchpad. The money is earmarked for investments in cutting-edge research equipment and instrumentation for testing battery performance.
“When I look at what the state is building in clean energy, I see an ecosystem building model,” Schwartz said.
Jud Virden, associate lab director of PNNL’s Energy and Environment Directorate, echoed those thoughts. The launchpad, he said, will create “new opportunities for cleantech innovation and economic growth here in the Pacific Northwest.”
PNNL has multiple battery, grid and energy initiatives already underway. The national lab is leading Battery500, a DOE-sponsored consortium that is developing longer lasting, higher energy lithium-metal batteries — essentially, batteries that hold more juice and can be recharged more times. PNNL is also a partner in the DOE’s Joint Center for Energy Storage Research.
Editor’s note: Story updated on March 11 with comments from PNNL.
