21st Century Energy Security

Brookhaven’s energy research over the next decade will draw on our considerable scientific expertise and leverage our world-class facilities to help reduce the carbon footprint of our energy economy. Partnerships with industry, other National Labs, and universities — including the Advanced Energy Center at Stony Brook University — will be a key component of our strategy, ensuring that our efforts are well informed by and focused on overcoming the key challenges to deployment.

Reducing carbon can be achieved via two pathways: by improving the generation, transmission, and storage of electricity as a way of displacing the use of fossil fuels, and also by developing sustainable chemical conversions to generate renewable fuels. Brookhaven’s program will address the low-carbon challenge via both pathways through the study, design, and refinement of:

  • Materials for electricity generation and conversion, particularly solar energy conversion devices and catalysts to improve the efficiency of fuel cells
  • Materials for energy storage for large-scale implementation on the nation’s electricity distribution grid, to facilitate more widespread use of intermittent renewable energy sources such as wind and solar
  • Materials for electricity transmission, including strongly correlated materials such as superconductors able to carry electric current with no energy loss
  • Sustainable chemical conversions, such as the use of solar energy to generate fuels from abundant materials, or the use of electrical energy to create new fuels

Much of this research will take place at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) and National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS)/NSLS-II, which house an outstanding and complete set of complementary tools to synthesize, probe, and understand nano-structured materials and interfaces with unprecedented precision and resolution. Our New York Blue supercomputer will provide computational support for theoretical studies and modeling, and the future Joint Photon Sciences Institute, a partnership between the Department of Energy and New York State, will cultivate and foster collaborative, interdisciplinary R&D.

CFN and NSLS researchers

Researchers at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (left) and the National Synchrotron Light Source

The Long Island Solar Farm, 32-megawatt solar array constructed onsite by BP Solar will provide additional research opportunities — such as monitoring incoming radiation versus electricity output at a whole new level of detail — to address large-scale solar panel operation and integration issues.

The Lab will also pursue systems-engineering research focused on grid and transmission-related challenges, which will include:

  • Participation in an Advanced Electric Grid Innovation Support Center linked with the Lab’s computational facilities for real-time monitoring of Northeast grid performance and the development of responsive capabilities
  • Smart-grid partnerships with New York Independent System Operator (NYISO — manager of New York’s electricity transmission grid), the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and others
  • Studies of large-scale implementation of renewables into transmission and distribution systems in partnership with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), BP Solar, and others

By coupling discovery in materials science with real life energy deployment applications, this overall research program provides an integrated approach to addressing energy challenges of the 21st Century.

Nanomaterials research at Brookhaven seeks to refine materials used in electricity generation -- like photovoltaics