 For our next session, I'm going to introduce really two really popular speakers from the Department of Material Science and Engineering, Dr. Will True and my advisor, Dr. Itui. Both of them are senior fellows in the Pre-Core Institute for Energy. They both have research dedicated to energy storage and they're the faculty co-directors for StorageX Initiative, which expedites the process from academic breakthrough to industrial impact. I will let the experts speak for themselves. With Professor True introducing Energy StorageX with more in depth and then Professor Itui talks more about our group research. Without further ado, let's welcome our two speakers for the 40 minute presentation. Great. All right. Well, I know you've heard this a thousand times. Let me at my welcome virtually everyone to Stanford. It's a pity that I'm not able to meet you in person. I've always used this opportunity as a way to meet all the incoming students to Stanford across all seven schools. Before I start, maybe I can just ask Eosu to show his face and say hi as well. E? Hello everybody. Welcome to Stanford. One more time. So as Raleigh introduced that E and I are the co-directors of the StorageX Initiative in Pre-Cort. And it's our pleasure to tell you about this initiative that we launched in October of 2019 to tackle the challenge of energy storage. I think over the week you've heard about various aspects of energy and we believe storage is one of the linchpins to total decarbonization, whether it is for transportation for the electrical grid or for more advanced applications beyond those. And before I get started, I'd like to just acknowledge in addition our managing director Jimmy Chen and all of the folks who have contributed to launching this initiative. So I thought I would give a brief history of energy storage at Stanford. So unless you've been living under a rock, you know that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year was awarded to three individuals who had really transformed the way we live. These were John Goodenough, Stan Wintingham, and Akira Yoshino who were awarded for their discovery and invention of lithium-ion batteries. And all of you have probably a dozen or more lithium-ion batteries in your possession if you have an electric vehicle even far more than that. And this is something that has transformed how we use energy, how we use information, and it's going to have very far-reaching consequences going to the future. So our history at Stanford for energy storage, especially on the technology side, really started in the 60s and 70s with our colleague Bob Huggins. And Bob Huggins was an early pioneer of research of ionic transport. So this is the underlying mechanism to lithium-ion batteries. And he mentored Stan Wintingham as a postdoc who later on to receive the Nobel Prize and also Michelle Armand, another key developer of lithium-ion battery technology. So this revolution really happened more than half a century ago right here at Stanford. And I couldn't agree more with the previous speaker that Stanford really is one of their birthplaces of innovation and this is no exception for energy storage. So let me give some perspective on the scale of energy storage and perhaps the best way to characterize that scale is by the market size. So energy storage is a very broad term. It includes technologies like lithium-ion batteries, but also other technologies. For example, pumped hydro where you would pump water up and elevation and flow it down to store energy. It could also involve thermal storage and other type of energy storage technologies. If you look just at the battery segment, which is defined as electrochemical energy storage, that segment is going to, it's approximately $50 billion in market today. And in the next 20 years, it will grow to over $1 trillion, which is roughly the size of the semiconductor street today. And the applications that energy storage touches upon could be, includes transportation, includes consumer electronics, includes electrical grid. So let me highlight a few of those. In terms of the electrical grid, what is really important is that as the use of renewables such as solar and wind increase, you have to always worry about the intermittency of those renewable sources. So this is so-called variable generation. You might have already heard about it in the energy at Stanford. To mitigate this intermittency, energy storage is very much needed, and this is one of the major up-and-coming use of energy storage. In terms of transportation, the revolution in electric vehicle is already happening, has been happening for the past decade. Looking forward, the costs will continue to decrease for electric vehicles because of a cost learning curve in battery technologies, but also as the cost comes down and performance increases, new applications will emerge as well. For example, we already see the emergence of drone technology using batteries, but as they get better, batteries will also enable electric aviation. It would enable freight beyond just passenger transportation. So I think the excitement and the possibilities are really unlimited. And the StorageX initiative is here to really capture the imaginations of all those working at Stanford and our industrial partners to try to translate some of the fundamental science we do here to real-war solutions. So now let me give a slightly deeper overview of energy storage. Like many other disciplines we approach here at the Precourt Institute, we embrace the richness in the science and engineering. And this is how we view energy storage, and this is an example for batteries, but you can extend this to almost all forms of energy storage technologies. You really have to think about the chemistries and the materials. You have to think about the devices, and most certainly you have to think about the systems. And two ways to think about it is to think about the time scale and the length scale that it encompasses. So if you look at the lower left hand corner, we have the very, the smallest and the fastest process happening at picoseconds and nanometers. So this could be, for example, the movement of lithium atoms in lithium-ion batteries. And as you move to the top right, you start increasing in length scale and increasing in time scale, reaching the orders of other microstructure inside batteries, to battery devices, to battery systems. And here in the battery area, we're really combining all aspects, synthesis, manufacturing, characterization, modeling, data analysis to really attack all the underlying science and engineering problems. And one of the great things we have at Stanford is the people. We have now formed a team of more than 20 faculty members and nearly 200 graduate students and postdocs to tackle this wide-ranging time and length scale when it comes to energy storage. We have colleagues working on chemistry. We have colleagues working on structure and device design. We have colleagues work on systems and economic analysis to really try to span all the skills I have discussed here. And we have colleagues contributing from four out of the seven schools at Stanford. So this is really a team effort to pull this together to tackle this challenge of energy storage. I want to take a moment to appreciate our industrial partners. So this initiative creates a co-innovation ecosystem. And by co-innovation, we mean that to integrate the innovators here at Stanford and the innovators in industry, who many of them are charged with the task of scaling up the solution to the tarot hour and to the trillion dollar scale. And these are the companies we are working with. They go all the way from materials and raw materials and chemistry to devices to energy systems. And we're now in the process of adding additional partners to have a comprehensive coverage both horizontally and vertically within the marketplace to really attack the problem from all ends. So let me take a moment to discuss what we think to be the top research priorities for the initiative. Let me note that this is just the starting point. We are in the process of expanding and refining, but I think this will give you a flavor of the top challenges that we think the community at Stanford and elsewhere face. Probably the most important priority for us is to develop energy storage technologies that's disruptive and also satisfy different requirements depending on the use cases. And this is really embracing the X in storage acts. We are now looking at energy storage technologies of all forms, not just batteries and embracing this diversity of technology and subscribing to the view that there is no silver bullet, no single silver bullet is one of our key ideas. With regards to energy storage technologies, cost is one of the dominant issues. And as you have seen in lithium-ion batteries, the cost learning curve has been steep. Sustaining it is going to be an incredible challenge. So we are keeping very much in mind the cost of the technology, the cost of deployment, the cost of scaling. Third, we are continuing to identify pathways to improve batteries. And what we really want is a battery technology that can give you high energy density, high power, safety and long lifetime, all of them together. It's difficult to have all four at the same time. And this is something that continues to motivate us. Number four, as I mentioned, to scale up to the tarot hour to the trillion dollar scale, we really have to think about manufacturing. And you have heard a lot of Gigafactories, for example, in the popular press, and a lot of the underlying problem are very scientific in origin. So we're continuing to invest time and effort to think about how basic science could help to speed up the scaling up process. Number five, as the battery market continued to explode, a circular economy is very much needed. And this is discussing the reuse, recycling and regeneration of batteries. And then to also understand the cradle to grave environmental impact for deploying technologies like batteries. One really good example is the lead acid batteries. Lead acid batteries has a recycle rate of 95%. And this is why we get to use lead, which is a toxic element in a sustainable fashion. So something like this has not been realized, for example, for lithium-ion batteries. And this is something I think that's going to far reaching societal impact in the next one or two decades. And then finally, it took us about 40 years to get to where we are with lithium-ion batteries. And I do not believe we have 40 more years to do this. So we are now very much concentrated on speeding up and accelerating the pace of research and development. We are leveraging informatics and artificial intelligence to think how we can develop these technologies in a much shorter timeframe, which is required by all the climate challenges we have. So these six research priorities hopefully give you a sense of what we are after in our faculty, colleagues, students and postdocs, and we hope to help you to participate in some aspects of this during your time at Stanford. So let me say a few more things and hand it off to Yi. One of the pillars of storage is to connect fundamentals to translation. On the left I'm showing you some of the key characteristics of academic research. These include fundamental understanding, materials design, big science facility you heard from Professor Chi Cheng-gao, who is the director of Slack, and our ability to embrace new directions very quickly. On the other hand, we have industrial R&D on the right, and there the core competence include prototyping, scaling up, optimization, integration, cost, life cycle, business models. And our goal is to empower our students, postdocs, staff and faculty to combine the best of both worlds in a pre-competitive setting with the singular goal of derisking the commercialization of technology, meaning to deliver the solution at a very large scale. This slide is a little busy, but it lists a couple of the major projects we're working on. You can read them. It gives you a sense of the breadth of the initiative. It really covers everything from technologies to policies to decision-making and other aspects of energy storage. Let me very quickly highlight two themes that we're working on, and these two things I'm highlighting really capture, I think, the integration of storage X. One theme is extreme fast charging. So extreme fast charging refers to developing the technologies and the infrastructure needed to charge batteries quickly, and this has very significant impact, not only on passenger transportation, but also on freight and aviation. And to give you a sense, to charge a battery in five minutes, for example, an electric vehicle will take about 1.2 megawatt of power, and this is equivalent to about 1% of a Boeing 737 taking off. So this describes the challenge of the problem. Another way to view the problem is just simply look at the electricity demand, and this was highlighted by the previous speaker, if you think about having 5 million electric vehicles in California in 10 years. This is going to translate to about 50,000 fast chargers, and we're talking about just today's fast charger, not the five minute charger. This is your sort of 90 minute charger. This is going to require about 25 gigawatt of co is an peak power. And this means we have to increase the power capacity in California by two times. So this gives you a sense of the, how enormous this challenges. And here as storage X, we are really trying to approach this from a holistic manner. This flow chart here describes how energy would flow from the electrical grid all the way to the battery. We have to think about the charging station, managing the grid. High power electronics, high conductivity cabling, we have to think about the vehicle which controls the charging. And this could be thinking about how to deliver the electrons in a efficient manner and this will leverage data analytics. We have to think about engineering of the battery packs for managing heat for sensing failures in the battery. We have to think about the battery cell in terms of the microstructure, the chemistry. We have to think about the underlying materials to achieve sufficient kinetics, for example, to be able to move lithium back quickly. So this is one problem we're tackling and it requires integrations of many expertise. The second theme, I want to show you briefly is the circular economy. Again, to give you a sense of how enormous this problem is, by 2030, the most conservative estimates indicate we will have about one terawatt hour of second light batteries. So these are batteries that are coming off their first use cases, for example, EVs. And this will result in a tens of billion dollar market, not to mention embodied CO2 from the manufacturing of the battery. So really what we're thinking about here is how do we make decisions after the battery comes off their first use? Do we recycle it by taking the material and reducing down to the key, the initial ingredients? Do we reuse it in a second life application or third life application? Do we regenerate it? So a lot of these decisions make and rely on the economics and the valuation. So we're in the process of building a valuation model so we can make these decisions. And it requires input from many things. For example, we're using data science to predict how batteries would behave in their second life use cases. We are thinking about the system engineering, so how do we design the battery pack so they're easily reused or regenerated or recombined from one application to another. And thinking about the actual practice of recycling, how to lower the cost and the carbon footprint, and also thinking about chemistry strategies to take a battery that has been spent and then regenerating it. So with this, let me stop here and hand it over to Yi, who now will give you a highlight of some of the research in his groups on how nanomaterials have really transformed battery technologies over the past 15 years. Yi? Okay, thank you, Will, for the introduction. As you can see, everybody is really, really exciting to work on energy storage. Let me play. Okay. Well, you have seen the very rich history Stanford right here to work on batteries now expand much further on energy storage is because storage X, X equals to batteries plus many, many other things. And I want to share with you some perspective after joining faculty about 15 years ago to, I will say we start the battery program right here Stanford so I'll call it Bob Harkins has retired for many years, a member coming in and I didn't even know he was a Stanford. I didn't work on benefits before. So after coming here, it appeared to be already very exciting. It's necessary to have energy storage solution for the car for the electric grid. I want to share with you some of the examples in my lab. Will has nicely, you know, giving out his time initially we were thinking about also having him to show his group example as well. He has a many, many exciting project in his group. You could learn about. Coming back to this reinventing the batteries where you see lithium iron batteries are getting the Nobel Prize last year, but the invention really started about 50 years 40 years ago. It's indeed the he's showing me a battery just as old as me. I look at that when our alumni Stan Wittingham and published the science paper that was in 1976 by the way that was the year I was born. So I often time make sure I was born for the lithium so So in reinventing batteries try to answer this question. Well, how high energy density can batteries go while per kilowatt per liter per way or per volume can be double cheaper of that. There's huge meaning right there. Battery life much longer will mention in his previous slide right we were very long battery life 30 years 10,000 cycles or more. How fast can we charge less than 10 minutes can we get to five right five minutes you're going to have Boeing 787s 1% taking off power. That's a lot of power. Life is completely safe. We do the cost three to five times we use and recycle grease get and season the storage all this question has huge research opportunity. Lootie back to science engineering 15 years I set up research program Stanford is just amazing place you know I have, I have no bad experience before coming to Stanford. I have a lot of materials working on electronics looking working on nano wire content dot and so on I come to Stanford. That was the time we have global climbing energy project that's the, the organization gave me the first funding grant let me really start a battery program at Stanford. So over the years we try to address these challenges. I mentioned in previous slide, but let me just highlight a few we didn't show the amount of the time. One is how do we do high energy density batteries. If you look at the Nobel Prize winning work that's, and the left right here right that's the lithium my phosphate lithium cobalt oxide and lithium graphite, you know, that's the end no. So what causes is the amount of a volume expansion once you put lithium in and take lithium our horizontal axis is the lithium store in a host materials. What's the atomic ratio of lithium number versus the material you store lithium. The left about one to six, you know, six host atoms, only one lithium you spend a lot of atoms store one lithium. That was the, you know, previous 40 years, then you ask the question to increase the energy density I want a lot more. How do I get it. And you need to have this new materials coming in store more and more lithium this ratio goes up and the relative volume change will go out. So if you can make a new materials to work, you know, this is the roadmap. And we really like I think this is also the roadmap many people will agree is we are now in the bottom right here close to about 300 wild per kilogram using graphite and lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide. Can we go higher using silicon and now using metallic lithium and now and then change the cathode as we are on the top is lithium metal and software. This allows you to have a roadmap possibility of double or might be even getting close to triple of the energy density down the road. So you can know how to make this materials to work. So, and over the years using silicon as an example in 2008 we published this paper of and using silicon nano wire to solve the big problem of the volume expansion I showed you in previous slide new materials you want to reinvent the battle using new materials. The big volume expansion structure change mechanical breaking. So 2008 we published this paper using the nano science approach to solve the volume expansion breaking problem and make it more stable. So it's this fun just the journey really started then and over the past 15 years now we have a 12 generation of material design I won't go into details. So each these design is trying to solve breaking problem instability of the interface between your materials and the electrolyte reduce the surface area making a low cost and so on. It's a really, really good learning process for us. This is also through this research, indeed, you know for me coming out of a different field, and now opening our new field nano science design for the battery so that now it's growing into really really big. Then what's the holy grail right there to have high energy density is really the lithium metal metallic lithium and no, you know, graphite moving to silicon increase energy density if you can use metallic lithium and no. That will be great 50 years ago when people started lithium based research is trying to use lithium metal metallic lithium. But during the plating, you know this layer plating building it up and when you do better challenge you're going to strip away this lithium this plating is stripping mechanism. We really don't know how to handle because you need a few hundred 500 cycle 1000 cycle or more, eventually 10,000 cycles. This process create a lot of problem growth growing up then get it lithium cost of their lithium formation we don't know how to handle that. So as Stanford right here we have a team of people. I work closely with Steve to with an unbound and try to we actually invent a new approach how do we design a stable host materials put lithium in store metallic lithium right there just like graphite store lithium iron now we have approach to store metallic lithium into nano scale domain making more stable. We also learn how to build stable interface using new type of polymer coating cell healing and many invention really happened in the past roughly seven eight years so it's been really exciting area. So we'll we'll just didn't have chance to show you his own data he has his mapping or plating a stripping over using atomic force my cross my cross compete him to really monitor the new creation process that that's just been fantastic so we now have a really a center of expertise and it's really a central excellence right here of tackling this a grand challenge is the holy grail of bad research. So I want to mention also battery charging as as well it's a full of exciting opportunity will mention to you you know battery fast charging is a system that will sink thinking from the grid from the pack to sell to materials. Let me highlight inside the cell right what you need to consider is mass transport how fast you can move lithium iron or other iron with is other type of batteries. How do you let the chat chance across interface right going into the material crossing the liquid and solid interface right there. And then this temperature in homogeneity this is a cell inside hotter because dissipating heat to outside. You know will be slower compared to the outer part of this battery cell and the thermal issue will induce many complications. So this is an area multi discipline research is needed people working on chemistry materials, thermal and mechanical engineering and electrical engineering and the electronic design and the grid level and only to come together to tackle this problem. So let me also emphasize and University, we need to have really powerful tools right here. And we have slack just, you know, and really on Stanford land, you have learned about slack having this powerful x-ray tool. We use that to a lot and and really, you know, having a many major discovery and understand the batteries how it really work. And here I want to emphasize another tools another side of the tool Stanford is trying to building up even more right now. What is this in situ electron transmission electron microscopy you can build a battery cell inside transmission electron microscopy for example this is silicon nanoparticle. You put lithium in during charging, you can see this particle volume expansion is taking place. Eventually the stress stream buildup is too big this particle will be broken. And this level to really allow us to study how badly fail. Understand chemo mechanical coupling in this process. Another tool we use a quite a bit is this. This is in situ SCM nano indentation you have a mechanical and dental and then onto these many this aggregation of nano particle forming secondary particle. That's actually the force and displacement and then you see how this particle get broken under what force and really started this mechanical behavior and in real time and really figuring out what's the guide guiding principle to design the material that can take on mechanical pressure. Right here inside T and we have this environmental TM Titan like this is lithium metal use exposed to that nitrogen a little bit of moisture, just go we have this lithium metal like crazy, and really help us to understand why this battery material so sensitive to water. So I also want to highlight one more new technique is cryogenic electron microscopy in 2017 you have learned about a Nobel Prize was given to the cryo EN to solve the protein crystal structure right for by all the structure biologists get getting the Nobel Prize. In 2017 we also published this paper for the first time using cryo EM to study the battery materials the reason to use that is better materials are fragile under the beam oftentimes they're not stable. Before this paper, there has never been a high resolution atomic scale resolution of lithium metal image. So right here we develop this tool how do you freeze your sample into liquid nitrogen that's very cold and stabilize that doing a cryo transfer and put it into the TM green and make it more stable and we were able to resolve atomic scale resolution of lithium metal for the first time. The Nobel Prize tool will open up huge opportunity to look into the better interface so called solid electron interface as SCI look at a many fragile material important energy materials met organic framework pro sky solar cells, catalyst. Now this is really an explosion stage. Actually, tomorrow is the time a National Science Foundation will start a really a TM workshop to discuss, you know, what TM to should be developed to impact energy quantum materials. So I will end my presentation by sharing with you resonate with earlier speaker Stanford is a place combining cutting edge research and entrepreneurship really well in my 15 years here. In fact, I know nothing about starting up company, but his environment is really nurturing me to think about how do I take the materials that knowledge and from academia level into industry. In 2008, Emperors using the silicon nanowires silicon and no technology generating the highest energy density batteries now in the world. It's a major discussion with many application companies to use that for example and Emperors battery enable airbus commercial drone flying for 25 days without stopping and 70,000 feet of energy density needs to be very high. And a few days ago we just announced spinning out a new company for large scale energy storage core and a venue. And taking our nickel hydrogen metal hydrogen gas batteries and and now having extremely long cycle life 30,000 cycle, you know, 30 years lifetime low cost to impact risk of storage. This is a new type of textile I work on also we now put into the commercial space I want to share with you I have a career clothing right here. This is the warmest clothing ever invented in the world. It's only pond three millimeter thick, but this allow you to go to a temperature 10 degrees Celsius and you feel very warm. So five is COVID-19 you know we have this nano fiber technology and made the best mask with a great credibility even though this is not related to energy story I want to share with you. The step is the place to do invention and then even in commercialization this is the mass from a foresee air and having the amazing credibility because a nano fiber is in there. So I'll stop right here and coming back to energy storage again that's the topic of discussion today will and I will be happy to take any questions you have. I was curious, both of you focus a lot on large scale energy storage. I was curious, what was your opinion or initiatives and the storage X program on kind of the opposite end on Internet of Things on kind of millimeter cubed scale batteries. What technologies do you think will need to I guess develop in order to achieve a wide scale implementation. Maybe I'll take it first. I think in this moment opportunities very wide open this not a single technology yet for larger scale storage it ranging from timescale for minutes to hours to day to weeks and then to seasonal and each this time scale the requirement on the cost is very different. For example, lithium iron could be a might be able to handle right day to day, quite rare hours to hours, but seasonal will be too high cost. So that's why it's very wide open and it could be the benefit storage it could also be formal storage for example and other means of storage if people come up. The right technology is the right cause the right lifetime. It could fit so great scale storage because of these very different timescale and it can accommodate many different technologies in this space. Well, I don't know whether you want to add in something. Yeah, I think this is a great question and to add on what you already said. So for IOT the requirements are very different. So for example, it has to be small. So you're naturally maybe thinking some sort of a thin film battery that you can maybe build on the thickness of just a fraction of a credit card. You know one application of it is integration onto a credit card. So I think it will look very different than today's battery. The prominent technology being considered for IOT is solid state battery, which means no liquid all thin film built CMOS compatible. So this is going to be a very interesting area. It also builds upon the some of the advancement needed for electric vehicle flammability of the liquid electrolyte is a huge problem. So it's actually coming together in very interesting ways. In terms of the requirements, IOT batteries have to have very low self discharge rate, which means that you don't want it to lose energy unnecessarily. And that's very different than electric vehicles electric vehicles. If you lose your charge over a month. That's totally fine. But for IOT you might want it to stay around for a year. So it does call for a different set of technologies to do that. Very interesting. Thank you. Is that also one of the programs being pursued by the storage acts initiative or my professor's a center. So I don't know about others, but certainly E and I are working very actively on solid battery. There are a few theoretical efforts on solid state batteries as well. I'm not actually sure if anybody's building. Sorry, my son. So we are developing the materials for solid state battery. I'm actually not aware of anyone building a battery for IOT. That will be a very exciting directions. I think maybe in collaboration with our double E college. So IOT area is very diverse. It's very, very diverse probably need to go into what's the detail IOT why people are looking into that you find in many IOT area lithium iron could already be sufficient. But once you go to the IOT the footprint is so small we'll mention, you know, go to thin film solid state as needed. This probably require longer conversation and in double E and a few years ago I was interacting with our double E colleagues right there thinking about building one type of IOT is you can build a scanning electron microscope and in your pocket. I can see that as one type of IOT and then you need to have really tiny barrel of film film as an example.