Battery Researchers Create Shared Battery Data Genome

GOLDEN, Colo. — Top battery researchers across the globe — including those at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory — have joined in an ambitious movement to spur technology development through a shared Battery Data Genome.

The initiative seeks to replicate the collaborative spirit, deliberate focus and urgency demonstrated by the Human Genome Project, an international effort to sequence the human genome in the 1990s. 

Like the Human Genome Project, the Battery Data Genome aims to encourage increased data generation, collection and storage with flexible sharing to accelerate the development of new energy storage solutions to meet decarbonization goals. 

“Battery cell suppliers introduce new battery designs roughly every 18 months,” NREL Senior Energy Storage Researcher Kandler Smith said. “However, it can take a system designer 12 months or longer to characterize a new cell for their application. 

“As a community, we need to accelerate battery development and deployment to better transfer learnings from one battery chemistry to the next,” Smith said.

In practice, the Battery Data Genome seeks to collect data from every step of the battery life cycle, from discovery to development to manufacturing and all manner of deployments. 

Having universal standards for data management for each segment of the battery community is required for data creation. 

This is accomplished using AI algorithms designed to identify everything from new candidate electrode materials to improved battery pack construction to cell lifetimes.

“This is a call to action. We’re trying to energize and organize the battery community to contribute their data whenever possible, to as many people as possible, to enable powerful data science methods to catalyze breakthroughs,” said Argonne National Laboratory battery scientist Noah Paulson.

Building a repository of consistent and accessible data requires that companies work together to format information in a specific way with uniform standards for metadata — which identify how the data are collected. 

Although these standards do not currently exist, enhanced collaboration through the Battery Data Genome is necessary to improve the accessibility and sharing of crucial data. 

NREL supports the Battery Data Genome project as part of an international consortium led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Argonne and Idaho National Laboratories.

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