Sustainable Battery Materials for Next‐Generation Electrical Energy Storage

Abstract

Global energy consumption is continuously increasing with population growth and rapid industrialization, which requires sustainable advancements in both energy generation and energy-storage technologies. [1] While bringing great prosperity to human society, the increasing energy demand creates challenges for energy resources and the consumption of conventional fossil fuels causes increasing greenhouse gas emission. [2] Therefore, for a sustainable energy future, new technologies and new ways of thinking are needed with respect to energy generation, storage, delivery, and consumption. [3] To enhance energy security and reduce the negative health and environmental impacts of fossil fuels, there has been growing focus on the exploration of renewable energy sources, among which solar, wind, tide, and wave energies represent successful sectors at present. [4] However, the renewable energies are usually not continuously available due to external factors that cannot be controlled. The requirements of addressing the intermittency issue of these clean energies have triggered a very rapidly developing area of research-electricity (or energy) storage. [5] Battery storage systems are emerging as one of the key solutions to effectively integrate intermittent renewable energies in power systems. [6] Setting power cable-free, rechargeable batteries have powered extensive types of mobile electronics that are supporting our modern life. [7] Highpower-density and high-energy-density rechargeable battery technologies are also presently under vigorous development for vehicle electrification. [8] Utility-scale batteries are expected to enable a great feed-in of renewables into the grid by storing excess generation and firming renewable energy output. [9] Scaling up from portable power sources to transportation-scale and grid-scale applications, the design of electrochemical storage systems needs to take into account the cost/abundance of materials, environmental/eco efficiency of cell chemistries, as well as the life cycle and safety analysis. [10] A number of currently existing rechargeable battery technologies can possibly fulfil some of the aforementioned sustainability requirements. However, existing intrinsic limitations of energy-storage capacity or technological hurdles are hampering the deployment toward large-scale applications. [11] In this perspective, we first give an overview of the currently existing rechargeable battery technologies from a sustainability point of view. With regard to energy-storage performance, lithium-ion batteries are leading all the other rechargeable battery chemistries in terms of both energy density and power density. However long-term sustainability concerns of lithium-ion technology are also obvious when examining the materials toxicity and the feasibility, cost, and availability of elemental resources. Based off of recent research advances, strategies and approaches toward the enhancement of sustainability of lithium-ion technologies are first discussed. Then, emerging and cutting-edge battery...

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