Energy

Better batteries

Hanna Nordwall — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:00:00 +0000

Better batteries Hanna Nordwall Fri, 05/29/2026 - 12:00

Susan Glairon

Illustrations by Hanna Nordwall

Improving energy storage is key to the renewable grid. Here’s how CU Engineering is getting us there

CU Engineering researchers are working to solve one of the biggest challenges facing renewable energy: affordable, reliable energy storage.

In 2025, solar and wind accounted for roughly 90 percent of newly installed U.S. power capacity, according to a report by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. While renewables offer the most affordable source of new electricity and deliver emissions-free power, their dependence on weather and daylight makes energy storage essential to grid reliability, said Mike Toney, a professor of chemical and biological engineering.

“Better batteries will be critical to shifting our energy infrastructure away from fossil fuels.”

“There’s a need for inexpensive and safe energy storage to support renewable energy,” Toney said. “Better batteries will be critical to shifting our energy infrastructure away from fossil fuels.”

Challenges

Current battery technologies rely on materials with ethical, geopolitical and safety concerns, with end-of-life disposal posing environmental risks, Toney said.

Lithium-ion batteries are popular because they’re affordable, widely available, and can smooth out short-term fluctuations. But as more renewable energy is added to the grid, these batteries will be less suited to its demands, said Bri-Mathias Hodge, a professor of electrical, computer and energy engineering who uses computational simulations to study reliable and economical future power systems.

Hodge said that because solar and wind output change rapidly with weather and time of day, within the next decade the grid will need longer-duration storage capable of delivering electricity instantly.

“Most researchers agree it needs to be longer than 10 hours,” Hodge said.

Beyond lithium

Toney’s lab is working on one possible solution. He and his team study how electrolytes function in aqueous zinc-metal batteries, which use widely available materials — unlike lithium-ion batteries. They’re also researching sodium-ion batteries, which are inexpensive and also use abundant materials.

Associate Professor Chunmei Ban’s research focuses on what she calls “beyond lithium” battery technologies, including sodium and solid-state batteries for renewable energy and electric vehicles.

Ban, a mechanical engineer, explains that much of the supply chain for lithium batteries, including raw materials and manufacturing equipment, is concentrated outside the U.S. This makes it difficult for the U.S. to independently produce lithium batteries at scale and creates vulnerabilities in resource and technology access.

“Developing new battery materials is a very challenging and resource-intensive process,” Ban said. “Progress takes time because creating and testing new materials requires extensive modeling, material optimization and trial and error. Out of millions of possible compounds, only a small number are currently identified as suitable for batteries.”

“Developing new battery materials is a very challenging and resource-intensive process.”

Despite these challenges, Ban’s lab has successfully developed several new materials in under three years. They are being commercialized through her lab’s spinoff company, Mana Batteries.

These materials, such as new electrolytes for sodium batteries, are now being used in manufacturing and could support a wide range of applications — from grid-scale energy storage to vehicles and electronics.

“The discovery, design and synthesis of new materials present exciting opportunities for developing long-lasting and low-cost energy storage solutions for grid and vehicular applications,” Ban said.

Kimberly See will join CU Boulder faculty in August 2026 as a Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute fellow with an appointment in chemical and biological engineering. The See Group is looking to replace metals like cobalt and nickel with more sustainable options such as iron in lithium-ion batteries to lower cost while improving safety.

“Current lithium-ion technology provides the energy density needed for diurnal cycling (charging when solar power is abundant and discharging at night), but high costs and safety concerns limit widespread grid deployment,” See said.

Beyond batteries

Another possible solution can be found in Ankur Gupta’s lab. Gupta is researching supercapacitors — energy storage devices that charge quickly and last longer than traditional batteries.

Beyond the lab

Solid Power, a CU Engineering spinout founded by mechanical engineers, went public in 2021. It is now an industry-leading developer of next-generation all-solid-state battery technology, with major partnership deals with BMW and Ford and a manufacturing facility in Thornton, Colorado. It also boasts many CU Engineering alumni among its employees.

While supercapacitors are not known for storing energy for long periods, they could help manage grid fluctuations. During sudden spikes or drops in electricity demand, supercapacitors could rapidly supply or absorb power to stabilize the grid.

“The primary appeal of supercapacitors lies in their speed,” said Gupta, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering.

In the end, which type of storage technology prevails all boils down to cost, Hodge said. “The uncertain costs of future storage technologies make it impossible to predict which technology will ultimately dominate.”

Improving energy storage is key to the renewable grid. Here’s how CU Engineering is getting us there

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Exploring Colorado’s untapped geothermal energy potential

Charles Ferrer — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 18:58:24 +0000

Exploring Colorado’s untapped geothermal energy potential Charles Ferrer Tue, 10/21/2025 - 12:58

A major question looms over Colorado’s energy future: why does geothermal energy, a renewable resource, remain virtually untapped? CU Boulder researchers will examine the technological and social barriers that have held back geothermal development in the state.

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Sharafuddin earns Ryland Graduate Fellowship for control theory research

Charles Ferrer — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 16:28:17 +0000

Sharafuddin earns Ryland Graduate Fellowship for control theory research Charles Ferrer Mon, 10/06/2025 - 10:28

Evan Sharafuddin, a first-year electrical engineering PhD student, has been selected as the recipient of the Dwight E. and Jessica D. Ryland Graduate Fellowship for the 2025-26 academic year who is pursuing wind turbine control research.

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Building community around electrochemistry and energy innovation

Susan Glairon — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 15:26:41 +0000

Building community around electrochemistry and energy innovation Susan Glairon Sat, 09/13/2025 - 09:26

Co-organized by Professor Mike Toney, the 2025 Front Range Electrochemistry Workshop (FREW) broadly addressed electrochemical science, with this year’s focus on batteries reflecting their growing importance to everything from electric vehicles to renewable energy infrastructure.

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Power electronics researchers awarded $1.5M to advance energy technologies

Charles Ferrer — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 20:18:29 +0000

Power electronics researchers awarded $1.5M to advance energy technologies Charles Ferrer Thu, 09/11/2025 - 14:18

Luca Corradini, associate professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, is advancing energy technologies at CU Boulder thanks to a $1.5 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.

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Advancing real-time data compression for supercomputer research

Jeff Zehnder — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 18:29:48 +0000

Advancing real-time data compression for supercomputer research Jeff Zehnder Thu, 03/13/2025 - 12:29

Jeff Zehnder

Alireza Doostan is leading a major effort for real-time data compression for supercomputer research.

A professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, Doostan is the principal investigator on a $1.2 million Department of Energy project to change how researchers handle the massive amounts of data that result from complex physics problems like modeling turbulence and aerodynamics for air and space craft.

Compressing data is nothing new when it comes to computing, but advances in high- performance systems are now creating so much data that it becomes impossible to store for later analysis.

“Computing power has increased drastically, but moving and storing that data is becoming a bottleneck. We have to reduce the size of the data generated through large scale simulation codes,” Doostan said.

While some scientific analysis of turbulence flows can be completed faster on ever larger high-performance computing platforms, much of the information must be discarded because the scope of the data is too vast to store, making it impossible to conduct later assessments.

“There is a lot of structure and physics embedded in the data that ideally needs to be preserved to study complex flow physics or develop faster models,” Doostan said.

The goal of the grant is to both maintain accuracy of modeling data while decreasing its complexity, and critically, allowing it to be stored by compressing it in-situ, or in real-time as it is created during modeling. This is not currently possible for large-scale models, as existing technology often requires some or the entire modeling simulation be completed before compression can begin.

Joining Doostan on the project is a team of CU Boulder faculty, including Ken Jansen and John Evans, both also from Smead Aerospace, and Stephen Becker from applied math.

The team is focused on development of both traditional and deep neural models for massively parallel implementation of novel linear and non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques. It is a major undertaking, bringing together researchers with a broad range of backgrounds, including computational physics and sciences, discretization, machine learning, linear algebra, and statistics.

“This is a very interdisciplinary problem,” Doostan said. “This is not a problem one person can solve. You need a team.”

For Jansen, whose research focuses on turbulence modeling, an advance in compression could lead to significant progress across the spectrum of high-performance computing.

“This data compression research is critically important to provide access to the dynamics of our simulations,” Jansen said. “As simulations have passed petascale and are now exascale, it has become impractical to write the full solution fields to disk at a sufficient frequency and count, owing to the broad range of spatial and temporal scales of turbulence.”

The group has completed soon-to-be-published research showing strong promise for their approach. They are now working to scale up their algorithms to work at scale on supercomputing platforms like CU Boulder’s Blanca cluster as well as Department of Energy systems.

“There is still a lot to be done, but our early work has shown success and only increases the computational load by less than five percent,” Doostan said.

The three-year award runs through fall 2027. Doostan is hopeful their final product will include publicly available next-generation compression software for general use by all simulation practitioners.

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5 CU Boulder startups to watch in 2025

Michelle Wiese — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 17:12:41 +0000

5 CU Boulder startups to watch in 2025 Michelle Wiese Mon, 02/03/2025 - 10:12

From July 2023 to June 2024, CU Boulder helped to launch 35 new companies based on research at the university. The new businesses are embracing technologies from the worlds of healthcare, agriculture, clean energy and more. Here’s a look at how engineers and scientists, with the help of the university’s commercialization arm Venture Partners, seek to use discoveries from the lab to make a difference in peoples’ lives.

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Lucy Pao earns IEEE award for advancements in wind turbine control systems

Charles Ferrer — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 18:42:34 +0000

Lucy Pao earns IEEE award for advancements in wind turbine control systems Charles Ferrer Tue, 01/28/2025 - 11:42

Lucy Pao was honored by the IEEE Control Systems Society for advancing research in wind turbine control systems. Her IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Award recognized the work with her former PhD student Michael N. Sinner, now a researcher at NREL and collaborators from ForWind – Center for Wind Energy Research in Germany.

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Pioneering sodium-ion batteries: a sustainable energy alternative

Charles Ferrer — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 17:12:55 +0000

Pioneering sodium-ion batteries: a sustainable energy alternative Charles Ferrer Mon, 11/11/2024 - 10:12

Charles Ferrer

Kangmin working in the battery glovebox under the direction of Dr. Ban.

CU Boulder researchers are exploring the use of sodium-ion batteries as an alternative to lithium-based energy storage.

While sodium is abundant and could help address supply chain issues linked to lithium scarcity, current sodium-ion batteries have not performed as well as lithium-ion batteries due to their lower energy density and shorter lifespans.

To tackle these challenges, Chunmei Ban, associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, and her research team are developing new electrolytes and studying how they interact with battery electrodes to enhance performance and longevity.

Funded by the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, this work aims to improve the overall effectiveness of sodium-ion batteries making them a more viable energy storage option.

Ban notes that sodium, widely distributed in the Earth’s crust, is an appealing candidate for large-scale energy storage solutions and is an emerging market in the United States.

“The sodium-ion battery market provides significant opportunities for new companies and a pathway to domestic manufacturing dominance,” said Ban. “Sodium may offer a potential remedy to concerns over resource scarcity with lithium-ion batteries.”

Researching battery alternatives

Kangmin Kim, a fourth-year chemical engineering student and BOLD Scholar, participated in the research project through CU SPUR gaining hands-on experience in hopes to further his research interest in battery technologies for graduate school.

“Lithium battery technology is reaching a point where improvements are becoming more incremental than transformative,” said Kim, “so we need alternative renewable technologies that we can rely on.”

Kangmin completes a summer research experience on sodium-ion batteries.

He believes improved battery technology is essential for advancing society and fostering a more sustainable energy future.

“We will need these improved battery technologies for everything from electric vehicles to drones and cell phones,” he said.

Through Kim’s research experience, he developed battery fabrication skills and learned the importance of precision and attention to detail in creating high-quality batteries.

“The lab work was actually quite similar to cooking, which is an activity I love to do,” said Kim. “Knowing what ingredients we need, what precautions must be taken, what tools and techniques are used are just like working in the lab.”

In mentoring students like Kim, Ban highlights how fulfilling it is to work with students who demonstrate a strong passion for science and technology and eagerness to learn.

“It has been a rewarding experience to witness undergraduate students like Kangmin grow their research and scientific skills in helping to solve some of our major global challenges.”

CU Boulder researchers are exploring the use of sodium-ion batteries as an alternative to lithium-based energy storage.

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