Maryland Energy Innovation Institute leads U.S. half of new joint U.S.-Israel energy storage technology development consortium

The Maryland Energy Innovation Institute will lead the U.S. side of an $18.4 million, five-year, U.S.-Israel Energy Center award from the Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation. The award will support development of lithium and sodium metal solid-state batteries for advanced energy storage.

"We are delighted to serve as the U.S. lead for one of the first consortia funded by the U.S.-Israel Energy Center," said UMD Professor Eric Wachsman, director of the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute (MEI2) a partnership between the University of Maryland (UMD) and the State of Maryland. Wachsman is the lead Principal Investigator for the U.S. portion of the BIRD Energy Center award. "Our industrial and academic partners, in both Israel and the U.S., are leaders in the development of battery materials, components, and cells, as well as materials informatics, and we look forward to addressing the research and development challenges associated with solid state batteries with them through our Energy Center.”

The goal of the U.S.-Israel Energy Center is to promote energy security and economic development through the research and development of innovative technologies. The Energy Center is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and by the Israel Ministry of Energy, jointly with the Israel Innovation Authority. Partners in the U.S. in addition to Maryland’s MEI2 include Saft and Forge Nano. In Israel, academic partners include Bar Ilan University (BIU) and Tel Aviv University, and company participants include 3DB and Materials Zone. MEI2 participants include University of Maryland Professors Wachsman, Sang Bok Lee, Gary Rubloff, and Paul Albertus.

This award was initially stimulated by a University of Maryland NanoCenter energy research collaboration with Israel’s Bar-Ilan Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced materials. UMD and BIU held the first teleconference on broad energy research in June, 2019, and agreed enthusiastically to pursue the US-Israel Energy Center program that the BIRD Foundation announced early last year.

This Energy Storage award was the largest of three awards under the U.S.-Israel Energy Center announced on March 6 by U.S. Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette and Israel’s Minister of Energy Dr. Yuval Steinitz. For more information on these BIRD Foundation awards click here.

The Maryland Energy Innovation Institute brings together science, industry, government and economic leaders to develop solutions to global and local energy problems (i.e. cleaner and renewable energy solutions; more efficient use and storage of energy) and assist the transfer of knowledge and resources to the public in addition to transitioning the research into marketable products and services through locally based entrepreneurial ventures.