Chicago’s most important research project enters second half

In 1991, after decades of research across different continents, Sony introduced the first commercially available lithium-ion battery. With the risk, they found reward — lots of it. Sony, and with it Japan, quickly became the world’s leader in consumer electronics with its ability to power devices like portable cassette players with smaller, more energy dense lithium-ion batteries. It was all made possible by the lithium-ion battery and Sony’s first-mover advantage.

More than two and a half decades later, a new set of frontiers in energy storage technology are being charted in and around Chicago.

Since 2013 the federal government has sent $120 million to the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, or JCESR (pronounced “J-Caesar”), to produce new batteries that can power autonomous vehicles, drones, and distributed energy grids. JCESR is led by Argonne National Laboratory and directed by Dr. George Crabtree.

Earlier this year the Department of Energy renewed the JCESR program, providing another five years and $120 million. The second half of JCESR — which cannot be renewed for a third term — will shift its focus significantly, I was told when I interviewed Crabtree last week at the University of Illinois at Chicago campus.

“In the first five years we were focusing on specific battery systems, and we chose four to work on,” Crabtree told me.

Two of the batteries are designed for transportation, lithium-sulfur and magnesium batteries. The third battery, the polymer organic flow battery, is designed to power electric grids. The final battery system, the “air breathing aqueous sulfur battery”, is designed to be the cheapest battery in the world, using three materials— water, oxygen, and sulfur — that are so inexpensive and abundant that they can supply the greatest possible battery demand without a rise in price.

Alas Crabtree and JCESR realized that these four batteries would
not meet the diverse needs for future energy storage. “We realized in the course of the five years that even if our four prototypes went commercial it would come nowhere near filling the need for the various kinds of batteries we will need in the future.”

Crabtree told me that the JCESR team will de-emphasize specific battery systems and instead emphasize transformative materials for batteries. They will now focus on the basic materials of battery research, testing anodes, cathodes, and electrolytes, “atom by atom, molecule by molecule, where each atom or molecule plays a prescribed role in producing targeted overall materials behavior.” This bottom-up approach requires a convergence of simulation, synthesis and characterization using advanced techniques that were not available five years ago.

The shift from specific battery systems to transformative materials
changes the end game for JCESR. “We’ll make test cells to make sure our materials work, but we’re not going to try to make a prototype for commercialization,” Crabtree said. “Instead we’ll let industry or the applied side of DoE (Department of Energy) or ARPA-E or the military make the battery with our materials. They’ll mix and match the materials we make to design the battery to the application, instead of adapting the one battery we have right now, lithium-ion, to every application.”

That could be a welcome development for a startups or small- and medium-sized businesses, giving them the opportunity to work with JCESR’s materials to develop next-generation commercial batteries.

For the air-breathing aqueous sulfur battery that JCESR developed — potentially the cheapest battery on the planet — has already been spun out to a startup, Form Energy, that is pursuing commercialization.

For the magnesium battery, the biggest materials challenge is the battery’s
electrolyte, which has to hold a charge of four volts. “All the electrolytes that we know about that would work with magnesium and oxides can’t work at four volts,” Crabtree said.

Crabtree cautioned that JCESR works “way more early stage” than the magnesium commercial battery sector. “Many of the materials we are working on did not even exist in 2013. But the materials we are developing have lots of potential.”

For organic flow batteries, JCESR has invest nigated organic polymer materials, bypassing current vanadium flow batteries that store charge in a single molecule.

“A typical organic molecule, a carbon ring, has six carbons in a ring, (and) you can hang any pendant molecule off of any one of those six carbons,” Crabtree said. “It gives you a huge design space to change the behavior. So instead of storing one charge, which is what you do with a vanadium (battery)…you can store several charges, one in each of the pendant molecules.”

The potential for a new battery design to overtake the current the vanadium flow battery — often passed over as too expensive or having too low energy density for the electricity grid— is one of the most exciting potential products of JCESR’s work. If an industry partner could use JCESR’s work to build a new organic flow battery to power local utility grids, the impact could be earthshaking.

Crabtree speculated that with advancements in energy storage for power grids, utilities could soon become a platform for third-party power exchanges. “I’ll send you this energy (through this platform), it’s renewable, and maybe use blockchain to curate the deals. That’s so different from how the utilities have been thinking about the distribution grid until now.”

Thomas Day is the co-founder of Invent2026