March 27, 2025: The US lead battery industry has taken part in talks focused on support for next-generation grid-scale battery storage tech at the US Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).

Battery Council International said on March 21 that representatives from leading energy storage companies and three national labs met at the PNNL campus on March 11 and 12.

The meeting was held to map out experiment plans and targets with the goal of improving energy storage and grid-scale battery technology in the US, BCI said.

The event was conducted as part of the Consortium for Lead Battery Leadership, which is a research program managed by BCI.

Developing next generation lead batteries through a research-driven focus on battery life, capacity, and cost-effectiveness was a key aim of the visit, BCI said.

Tim Ellis, BCI’s technical director for the Consortium for Lead Battery Leadership, said such public-private partnerships are critical to providing practical innovations in energy storage.

“By connecting key stakeholders at domestic manufacturers with the world-class research capabilities at our national labs and the US Department of Energy (DOE), we can accelerate research timelines and commercialize new products efficiently and cost-effectively,” Ellis said.

In April 2024, BCI was awarded $5 million by the DOE to establish the Consortium for Lead Battery Leadership.

The DOE asked the consortium to help research and develop lead batteries that are capable of 10+ hours of storage with a pathway to a $0.05/kWh levelized cost of storage by 2030. The current levelized cost of storage for lead batteries can be as high as $0.38/kWh. 

Ellis and Matt Raiford, of the Consortium for Battery Innovation, is supporting research and collaboration between private-sector stakeholders and public-sector researchers at the DOE and the Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in addition to PNNL.