CalCEF, which creates institutions and investment
vehicles for the clean energy economy, and Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) announced a partnership to launch CalCharge, a
consortium uniting California’s
emerging and established battery technology companies with critical academic
and government resources. By bringing together the dozens of battery companies
and institutions in California working on applications for consumer electronics
batteries, electric/hybrid vehicle transportation, and the electric grid,
Berkeley Lab, CalCEF, along with other Bay Area academic institutions, aim to
create a regional ecosystem for innovation in energy storage that will not only
jumpstart a new era of battery technologies but also help ensure that United States
companies succeed in this highly competitive environment.
“The next decade will be critical for this industry
and this region,” said Berkeley Lab Director Paul Alivisatos. “With our highly
regarded battery scientists and state-of-the-art equipment at Berkeley Lab, the
CalCharge consortium will be able to leverage these resources to enable the
development of battery solutions for electric transportation and other clean
energy applications in California.”
CalCharge is a first-of-its-kind public-private
partnership working to accelerate the timeline of energy storage
commercialization and market adoption through technology assistance, workforce
training, and market education. Members will have access to Berkeley Lab’s scientific
facilities and personnel, including testing and diagnostics equipment not
available to many start-up companies. CalCharge offers a streamlined and more
affordable channel for Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs)
and similar arrangements. These allow firms to access technical resources at
the Lab, which will help scale battery innovations from the bench to the market.
“To broadly scale renewable energy requires
tackling the challenges of energy storage, and no technical community is better
suited to those challenges than California’s
battery engineers and scientists,” said Dan Adler, CalCEF’s president. “The
companies and organizations that make up CalCharge will be central to forging a
renewable energy future.”
California has
emerged as the epicenter of battery innovation in the U.S., with more
than 30 startups and large companies concentrated in the Bay Area alone. The
state has consistently led battery technology patent registrations, reaching
258 filings from 2008 to 2010—more than the next three leading states
combined—according to the 2012 California Green Innovation Index, an annual
economic filing published by Next 10. What’s more, in 2011 venture capital (VC)
investment in energy storage grew thirteen-fold over the previous year, making
up 11% of the total VC investment in clean technology for the state.
“There’s a lot of battery know-how in California, specifically
the Bay Area, but technology startups need an ecosystem to thrive,” said Venkat
Srinivasan, head of Berkeley Lab’s energy storage research program. “The
Berkeley Lab battery program, long known for its deep expertise in solving the
problems in advanced batteries, is ideally positioned to work with battery
companies in the region. We look forward to building this ecosystem with
CalCharge.”
A thriving regional ecosystem for battery
development requires contributions from diverse partners, including companies
involved in advanced battery technology, customers who will use that
technology, and research institutions that can offer expertise and equipment to
accelerate development of new technology as well as an educated workforce
pool—all supported by local governments that will provide the policies and
incentives to foster a regional energy storage industry.
“We wanted to start CalCharge because we know that
emerging energy storage companies are facing a complex market and major
technical challenges,” said Doug Davenport, co-lead of the CalCharge initiative
at Berkeley Lab. “CalCEF is an ideal partner for us because they bring a focus
on policy and markets that truly complements our science and technology
orientation.”
Cheaper and higher-performing batteries are
critical to our nation’s clean energy future—underscored by the White House’s
call for decreasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and putting one million
electric vehicles on the road by 2015. Nationwide efforts are also underway to
modernize our antiquated electric grid for increased renewable energy
integration and grid-scale batteries are an essential element. California has also made
strides to support battery technology development this year. It adopted the
world’s first energy efficiency standards for battery chargers and enacted the
second round of the Advanced Clean Car Rules, which targets a 34% reduction in
GHG emissions from 2016 levels by 2025.