Dan Steingart on Battery Innovation and the Future of Energy Storage

**Dan Steingart** (0:05)
My hope and my thesis is that with more batteries in the United States, making people's lives better, it will encourage better upstream manufacturing in the US because we just think it's important. We just think it's worthwhile. We'll think about it the same way we think about oil refining, which is what we should do.

**Bill Loveless** (0:24)
The conflict in Iran is a reminder of how quickly global energy markets can be disrupted. It also underscores why advances in things like battery technology from grid-scale storage to electric transportation are becoming central to energy resilience and security. It's been about 50 years since British chemist Stanley Whittingham laid the foundation for the first lithium-ion battery at an Exxon research lab in New Jersey. In 2019, he and two other scientists, John Goodenough and Akira Yoshino, earned a Nobel Prize for the breakthrough. By then, lithium-ion batteries had transformed consumer electronics and a growing segment of the transportation sector. And today, battery storage is playing an increasing role in supplying new capacity to the electric power sector. So what is the state of battery innovation today? Are there battery chemistries that could dethrone lithium-ion technology? How do mineral availability and environmental health play into the battery market? And what does the federal government's waning support for renewable energy mean for the battery industry? This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I'm Bill Loveless.
Today on the show, Dan Steingart. Dan is the Stanley Thompson Professor of Chemical Metallurgy and a Professor of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University. He also chairs the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering and co-directs the Columbia Electrochemical Energy Center. Prior to joining Columbia in 2019, Dan was an Associate Professor at Princeton University. Dan and I talked about technology improvements in the battery space and what those could mean for both performance and cost. We surveyed the leading battery chemistries, looked at different energy storage applications, and Dan told me what battery innovation he's excited about, but also what he thinks is being overhyped today. Here's our conversation. Dan Steingart, welcome to Columbia Energy Exchange.

**Dan Steingart** (2:41)
It's wonderful to be here. First time caller, long time listener.

**Bill Loveless** (2:45)
We appreciate that. You know, it's good to have you here for a conversation about a technology that's getting a lot of attention these days, and that's batteries. Hardly a day goes by when I don't see headlines about some breakthroughs. And it gets me to question how well we understand this technologies and the opportunities and challenges that it represents.
So here we are. You know, for people who don't live in the battery world every day, Dan, what's the single most important development in batteries right now that they might be missing?

**Dan Steingart** (3:21)
Well, well, it's such an interesting question because it's impossible for anyone who's listening to this podcast not to be living in the battery world. I challenge a listener to not count at least three lithium ion batteries within 10 feet of them right now. It's a remarkably ubiquitous technology. And I'm going to date myself. I'm going to date you a little bit here, Bill. I apologize for this. Because I think we both remember a time where people complained more about batteries and them not working when we needed them to, right? So whether it's a flashlight not working and you open it up and it's crusted over with that nasty white stuff or, you know, in the first set of portable phones where we had to deal with this silly memory effect, like did you remember to fully discharge the battery before you charged that? And anyone who's older than me, the first question I get from them is, do I still have to do that? My kids have no idea what they're talking about, right? And so it's less that the technology is getting better because the technology is getting better. But what I want to convey is that the technology now is good enough that we should be thinking how to install batteries everywhere to stabilize and prove, excuse me, grid performance and stop waiting for the next revision. What I hate hearing as a battery technologist is, well, we're going to wait for batteries when they can hit metric X, Y, or Z. As a battery technologist and having colleagues in chemistry and mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, that are in material science, that are working on new materials and certainly improvements, yeah, we'll get there, we'll get lighter batteries, we'll get batteries with longer range. But we're in a moment now where in order to make those improvements worthwhile, and in order to have companies want to make those improvements, product designers, end users of batteries should be thinking, how can I use them more? And how can I get the public comfortable with the ubiquity of batteries? And then how do we make sure that they're as safe as possible and we drive fires to zero? So I think that the most exciting thing in batteries now are the products that are coming out in and around batteries. And I have, I'm not a disinterested party in this. A company spun out of my lab this summer that participated in a ConEd pilot where we put large-ish one kilowatt-hour LFP batteries in series with air conditioners. ConEd gave a signal, said, we look like we're going to get to brand out conditions. The company sent a signal to the battery, said disconnect the air conditioner from the wall.