Climate Technologies and Trends with Yi Cui

Climate Technologies and Trends with Yi Cui

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today let me share with you topic related to carbon neutral transformation particularly using nanotechnology but before i share with you about the technology innovation i do want to tell you about prequel institute a little bit about stanford energy so why you're here why i'm here to talk to you about carbon neutral transformation you have been seeing the commitment paris agreement turned by 2050 carbon neutral china 2016 russia 2016 india 2017 not only that more than 60 of fortune 500 companies have committed to climate goals this percentage is probably probably increasing every day and uh um amazon's climate pledge uh more than 200 companies google's 24 7 carbon free energy energy compact so stanford is starting a new school on climate and exactly addressing the global challenges and also resonate very well with the commitment from countries from companies so what what's happening in political institute you know about a decade long right together with the global energy academy project time about 20 years now our vision is sustainable affordable secure energy for all um so i stand for right here i'm proudly saying you know after becoming the director for about a year now and due to the previous three director's hard work stanford energy is already one of the best places to do energy research we have 200 plus faculty 100 plus staff 1000 plus students working on energy ranging from science engineering technology to economics finance and policy so it's all over the place to you know bring our expertise together from all the discipline to address the energy challenges and how do we put our act together you know what do we need to do and this is the uh a pie chart showing you where carbon comes from uh from electricity sector really big transportation very big industry agriculture commercial and residential building so what do we need to do it is to find ways to decarbonize certain electrical grids and using solar using wind electricity combined with a large-scale energy storage to make sure electricity is clean and transportation is another important areas you know the passenger car and the heavy-duty transportation ships aviation we need to decarbonize industry steer cement plastics agriculture for example fertilizer the livestock by what they you know generated in the day-to-day activity uh the building hvac lighting and so on so at stanford right here we organized our expertise together forming this what i call the fabric of stand for energy research the vertical column is really showing you um the science engineering technology initiative and we launch horizontal at those cross-cutting skill sets we also need for example for example we have bits and walls initiative to decarbonize the electrical grid we have launched storage x initiative there's a lot of battery research in there you know this is for transportation and also for you know coming up long duration storage to decarbonize the electrical grid the natural gas initiative how do you utilize natural gas without emitting co2 and we have catalysis center material center funded by department energy now at prequel institute we are in the process of launching carbon removal hydrogen and sustainable manufacturing initiative and cross-cutting is we need finance we need policy we need to conduct education and external communication and we need to utilize data and artificial intelligence to plan for the future energy system there's also significant task is technology translation that's probably the reason most of you are here today is the new school coming up and next slide i'm going to share with you this technology policy this so-called sustainability accelerator to be set up in the new school social and human behavior is important and global engagement so in pre-core institute is really functioning cross-cutting throughout the whole university cross-cutting the whole of the whole university all the schools and there is a new school coming out on climate sustainability this become the funding payload of the whole new school and this is the blueprint of the whole new school on the climate and sustainability there will be a you know kind of four division in the neighborhood of eight might even be ten departments to be set up and this performed academia function teaching recruiting faculty now prequel institute in woods institute become the founding pillar of the new school to help building up the department organizing the programs and there will be one institute for sustainable sustainable societies to be set up and also a sustainability accelerator to be set up to uh do the fast translation whether it's technology or the policy solutions uh into the real world so it's very very exciting time uh i mean for alumni right here you probably want to see this is stanford has not started the new school for the past 70 years this is first time it's tremendously exciting um now let me come to my own research i joined stanford faculty for about close to 17 years now my lab has been working on nano technology for sustainability from lab to market um about 15 years ago i worked on this battery technology with high energy density try to enable electrical transportation the range of the electrical electrical vehicle can be a longer so i find it empress to commercialize this technology and uh about six seven years ago looking at the uh air filter the uh air pollution and the developing countries china india and other countries and together with professor steve chu we worked on this technology and invented this one using nano fiber to remove the particles from the air and turn out to be this generally you know really cutting edge filtration technology during coal with nighting time and these was used to produce a facial mass with very high efficiency and low air pressure job and the breathability is really good um with the recognition of you know to really getting materials energy type of technologies into the market and this huge amount of resources needed so how do you really accelerate these technology from stanford lab lab into the real world fast and they share a lot of common platform right there and about four or five years ago with the uh you know endorsement from stanford office technology licensing i i set up in attack that's a technology accelerator use that to really license multiple technology developed in my lab and and incubate them accelerate them at the same time in the same space in the last couple of years we spun our the venue that's a large scale energy storage company live labs that's a thermo tech style cooling and warming textile company we're in the process it's been a water soil clean now and green building materials let me share with you some examples the technology innovation and also commercialization process in the space of material science nanotechnology energy and sustainability so the first one is the high energy batteries um nowadays no surprise but everybody knows about this it's uh benefits are everywhere from consumer electronics to electrical vehicles but if you look at how big the market is you know we have about billion passenger cars um in the uh and running in the whole world assuming each car needs about 50 kilowatt hour of batteries you know once these patches are completely become electrical we need 50 kilowatt hour batteries uh this is the better pack cost roughly down the road you know 10 years from now so this is a five trillion dollars market and the per year is a 500 billion just huge a demand right here um but what are the grand challenges for uh barefoot technology innovation giving the lithium ion nowadays get to where it is right now the key question we try to answer for innovation is well how high energy density can batteries go measure per weight or per volume that's wild per kilo wow per liter and can we extend the battery life three times or longer so if you could do that right you know instead of 10 years you could use it for 30 years like many many uh thousands of cycles this has huge meaning in the course this has huge meaning how do you reuse the batteries after the battery you know the car retire you can take the battery pack and use for other purpose can you do fast charging less than 10 minutes maybe even less than five minutes and uh can we make the batteries completely safe so without catching fire without explosion can we reduce the benefit cost by three times or maybe even more if you use the battery for seasonal energy storage connected with electrical grid you probably need to reduce the cost by ten times and how do you know the battery health condition and so far we have limited information related to the battery health can you come up with a new method for doing that what about battery reuse and recycling and how do you do brisket energy storage and even seasonal storage these are the really important questions including also the ninth one is can you make the batteries available flexible stretchable in the past uh 15 17 years my lab has been working on innovation try to address these uh questions so but let me just emphasize for example on the energy density that's very important can you move away from carbon graphite node using the negative electrode to utilize silicon or metallic lithium that has 10 times higher capacity so if you could do that you can increase the amount of energy you store inside the battery itself by a lot and in the positive electrical side can you move away from this transition lithium metal oxide and going to something very low cost very abundant such as sulfur it's not 10 times more charged and this combined with lithium metal for example can produce a very high energy density so we do have a roadmap right here based on the current technology roughly 250 260 watt per kilogram of energy density per weight if we can use silicon to pair with mmc mmc is this lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide right you can get to 400 or higher lithium metal and mmc you can get to 5 500. lithium metal and sulfur you can get to 600 or 800 watts per kilo so this is a really exciting road map and if we can enable this new materials um so one example is back in uh about 16 years ago my left started to work on silicon anode to replace graphite we have generation one that's a nanowires or silicon and grow onto this metallic foil to function as an anode and indeed producing a really exciting performance um and now through past 15 16 years we have 212 generations of design try to overcome materials problem chemistry problem interfacial problem and so on it's actually very top problem and to to solve to enable silicon but these are nano technology a lot of new material design principle we invented now you know i think we are mostly mostly solve the uh uh all the problems so this enable us you know back in 2008 so i founded empress as this is my first startup company you know over the past roughly 14 years empress has made huge amount of progress and now having the highest energy density batteries in the world rechargeable one you know running for example this is the benefit surprise to airbus having this drone uh you know flying a very high elevation um and uh continuous 5-25 days so it's a super exciting the energy density of this batteries is about you know 70 80 percent higher than uh what you see in the tesla cars for example so these are some of the recent announcements from empress and these actually just come out you know just really hard from the press it's empress technology shift commercial batteries reaching 450 per kilogram 11 50 wow per liter and energy density this is so much higher than anything you see in the market using silicon nanowire these also have extremely fast charging capability charged to eighty percent of its capacity from zero to eighty percent right within six minutes and this is another announcement the partnership is uh uh airbus and this is very exciting time empress is ramping up the production and with a few generation of silicon and no uh now shipping into the market i i i i'm very happy to see well you're going to see in the next several years you know five ten you know a long next number of years siliconangle will become the major one of the major driving forces to enable high and high energy density which also allow you to eventually reduce the cost because the amount of energy you store is a lot more so the second example let me share with you is the largest scale energy storage stationary storage this is different problem we need to integrate solar and vent electricity into the electrical grid so you need to stabilize electrical grid you need to store the energy while they are generated and use it during the time you don't have solar and wind right so the the requirement going from minutes to minute storage to smooth out the fluctuation to hours days weeks months even seasonal so the the requirement for the risk energy solution is very different um and if you look at the the world electricity generation eventually we would really like to have all the electricity to be renewable so it's very likely we're assuming just four hour storage per day right i'm not assuming longer duration this is already 10 tell what our battery you will need so this gigantic market you you you you will need to uh adjust so this whole market is growing as we are speaking right it's actually exploding right now um by looking at the requirement how low cost you need it to be the longer the time scale the lower cost per kilowatt hour of your battery uh sale or battery pack you will need to get down to so we are currently somewhere around here 200 in a pack level at 200 250. so eventually we want to go down to such a lower cost and uh religion might be able to do it you know the answer is probably not um and also you need it to be very long life you need it to be maintenance free and all climate condition extreme cold extremely hot very safe and created critical recyclability because these um there's so many battery uh packs you know the shipping container and you better enable the recyclability otherwise we don't have enough resources to build so many benefits you need to be really recycled reuse and bring back these resources right and release your mind really is sitting in the situation will be very hard to meet these all these challenges so about four or five years ago my lab invented i was reinvented this nickel hydrogen gas bare face the idea was try to think about what's the longest lifetime um bettest chemistry human being ever invented you know how do you pair them together to generate this uh very exciting electrochemistry for the batteries so turn out to be nick or hydrogen could be the very exciting uh choice and the hydrogen side is just a half of the fuel cell hydrogen become water back and forth nicosias nickel hydroxide become nickel oxide hydroxide this is very very reversible their cause is actually a low and this becomes super exciting not only that we actually invented completely new chemistry using manganese even low-cost and nickel to pair with hydrogen and coming up is a dissolution precipitation mechanism and this chemistry we found out can last for virtually forever in a very long lifetime 30 years 30 000 cycle zero accident very flexible from minutes to 72 hours a longer duration zero maintenance very low cost very wide temperature range as well for example it can go down to -40 degrees celsius and plus 60 degrees celsius this is so important because where you have solar electricity it's going to be very hot right most of the time when you have wind electricity a lot of them often time is cold and you do want to have this battery to work in the wide temperature range without using air conditioning currently lithium ion battery you do need to use air conditioning to maintain within a narrow temperature window in order to make it work uh to work well so with this technology i recently used inner inner tac to spin out innovation to a commercial like this metal hydrogen battery and building up these very big cells and now are building up this station and the shipping container highly durable so i'm indeed very excited to see uh innovator is making a lot of great progress is in fremont california and uh some of you might have seen the uh several months ago we have the announcement of a hundred actually 125 million dollars when we close the series a uh we use the lead investor like schlumberger new energy you know partner with other energy uh uh company and syndicate to invest in in the venue the technical progress has been tremendous and later this year in november we'll be delivering our megawatt hour level of you know shipping container and next year will go up to 100 megawatt type of range so very very exciting time uh i also want to share with you now the third technology air filtration uh the reason i started this technology invented this technology together with professor steve chu is when we saw the air pollution problem back you know seven eight years ago we said we got to do something about it well it turned out to be during colby 19 time this is a code uh uh is uh you know the wireless particle is actually within the pm 2.5 range uh um so steve and i invented this so these are the nano fiber we generated the reason this can have a really good filtration efficiency if compared with the micron fiber for the same porosity nano fiber you only need to use tiny amount of materials it's you already can reach the same porosity not only that nanofiber can divide our three-dimensional spray into these very small you know pockets of air can go through so the chance for air to come in the particle in the air to hit onto one of this nano fiber is so much higher than the micron fiber so your filtration efficiency is high certainly if you have static charge and the fiber is further enhanced the efficiency a lot more so this is the game you can play you know to enhance your uh filtration efficiency so uh after we found the 4c air we were able to now you know design our nano fiber production line and uh road to roll and uh during coding 19 turned out to be you know it wasn't we didn't plan to to go into the facial mass market you know so early and but kobe 19 heat so this force asked to uh generate a kn-95 level and 95-level facial mass to rescue the whole world first and it has very high filtration efficiency it actually has one of the best breathability his air pressure job is the lowest one is 20 100 better than the competing product so this nano fiber not only we can make the facial mass also window screen is also very exciting area it's transparent window screen um so just to report back to uh our alumni now foresee air this company online we have been selling these facial masks for the past two years we even designed a kids version of a k95 highly breathable very high efficiency so our math has been very popular they were sold out all the time you know um particularly the kids one you know we are we are kind of nearly unique you know having kids uh uh k 95 um so we also you know want to develop the technology further for example our design of transparent facial mass we participate in the bada niles your mass competition we were actually one of the top top ten winners to uh you know to come up with new ideas transparent facial masks people can see your mouth uh when you wear the mask and then speaking and so on so this type of filtration technology will also allow us to go into other applications very important so something very big one is hvac and and turbine intake as well and 4c air is now try to uh you know build a bigger production line to address this market now let me give you the fourth example of a cooling and warming textile this is also for the purpose of trying to enable sustainability but let me mention textile industry is already very big 2.5 trillion dollars market you

know from this fiber to fabric to clothing with all these different applications and when we started to work on a cooling and heating textile it's really try to save building heating and cooling energy consumption 13 of the total energy consumption used in heating and cooling so instead of cool down or heat up the whole building we ask the questions can we really now try to tune the set point of air conditioning in the summer time not so cool let it go up in the winter time not so warm like let it cool down but human body needs to feel comfortable so instead of cooling the whole building or hitting the whole building can we do personal air conditioning so the way to do it is well let's look into our textile the clothing we wear and it certainly has impact for car as well and can we look into the how we just dissipate the heat right 50 percent of the heat dissipation roughly is rely on infrared radiation that's why this infrared camera you know can see you so if you could control that in the summertime let infrared to go out then you feel cool in winter time make sure you keep your infrared then you feel warm so we need to design our textile for example for cooling a regular clothing is not transparent to the meat infrared radiation that's the wavelength range of our body in meat and but we do know there are polymers that can be transparent to the ir for example the kitchen wrap by the same time they're also transparent to the visible so you cannot wear it so our first invention was hey why don't we make it infrared uh uh transparent but uh reasonably opaque so we engineer nanopolar structure to scatter whisper light to make it a visually lpa but these pore sites are small enough they don't scatter the infrared light so it's still transparent they have a cooling effect so we measured this and really invented that now the first time cooling textile uh technology and uh to report back to everybody here and we survived yourself of r d right and later you know spent our live labs design we now have a commercial product we figure out the whole supply chain figure out the manufacturing now design our warm life this jacket and the vest are really really warm very thin very light very comfortable and i've been wearing this for you know many many months now during the winter so this is very very comfortable we also have a cooling now starting to to be sold online as well uh together with swarmlive the t-shirt the the sleeping whale we will be having you know the batting material the pillowcase also actually last summer i already tried the uh our product it's just incredible it's just so cool so cold let me also advertise a little bit indeed um we have the warmest uh jacket ever invented you know available it's called mega wall and this has the clone value of cloud value is the value to measure how warm your jacket is we have a 9.25 it's a close to 40 percent warmer than canada goose no uh manager it's amazingly warm and the weight is very light it's like 30 to 50 lighter than the competing uh a product out there um so so indeed i have been selling this and some of my friends bought the this walmart's jacket mega worm like one my friend bought it went to a tibet and uh she told me this is a minus 20 degrees celsius right temperature she's wearing only a t-shirt inside and the mega warm outside that just be enough uh sufficiently warm so i haven't tried this at such a low temperature yet so i didn't know so i was blowing away how well our mega one really work so and in summary i was showing you the examples of you know technology innovation addressing uh one more uh very important areas of energy and sustainability application ranging from batteries from air filtration from a personal fabric right and we'll have more coming i i believe example i show you right here with a new school coming up on sustainability and with our sustainability accelerator going and we are going to see you will be proud as a staff alum seeing this many new technologies as well as policy solutions coming out to make the real world impact

2022-03-08 22:14

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