SHIRLEY MENG

Founding Director of the Sustainable Power and Energy Center

Professor at University of Chicago

Chief Scientist of Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science

Professor of NanoEngineering and Materials Science at UC San Diego

Shirley is an expert and a global leader in electricity storage. Storage devices like batteries and fuel cells are the enablers we need to have deep penetration of renewable energy in our grid. Her ultimate goal is to play a part in the deep decarbonization of our society. Her team works on batteries for grid storage and mobile power sources. Shirley’s research lab has four top priorities driving their research -- safety, energy density, power, and cost.

The questions Shirley is addressing are “How can you make high-energy batteries never explode, never catch fire? How can you make a battery last for 30 years? How can you charge large batteries in five minutes without sacrificing any performance in the future? And then how can you have a battery completely recyclable?”

“We believe we can find engineering strategies to solve all those degradation problems, and we will make batteries last for 30 years.”

Her team is bringing the cost of lithium-ion batteries down by focusing on replacing cobalt (which is an expensive and rare element) with a material that is more abundant and cheaper and by recycling lithium which is also expensive. She projects that in the next decade more than 99% of the lithium-ion batteries will be recycled and the expensive elements in the batteries will be reused in new batteries.

Shirley shares her insight on how government, industry, and research have had moments of coordinated efforts that ebb and flow. Funding starts and stops and so does the research. The DOE played a critical role in enabling electric vehicles in the world, and Shirley thinks they should be proud.

“The research is really what's driving the economy. And a lot of things you can't really see. The person who invented the lithium-ion battery concept, Professor Whittingham, and Professor Goodenough, are not the ones there to run the companies that are making billions. But these scientists are the silent heroes who actually made the technology ready for the world. I think…in some ways I think the U.S. should be very proud that in the battery research field, the top scientists did their most influential work here actually… So I'm optimistic because I really believe in science.”