Sandia National Laboratories and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have become the latest members of Battery Council International.

Both US national labs have joined the organisation under a new public benefit membership category, BCI president and executive director Roger Miksad told Batteries International on June 17.

Sandia is the nation’s premier science and engineering laboratory for national security and technological innovation, supplying science-based, systems-engineering solutions to the most challenging national security problems. Sandia’s energy storage research contributes state-of-the-art capabilities and world-class expertise to help realise the national benefits of energy storage technologies and advance critical science and engineering.

PNNL, a premier US Department of Energy research institution, advances chemistry, Earth sciences, data analytics, and biology to strengthen energy resilience, enhance national security, and further scientific discovery. Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle and supported by the US Department of Energy Office of Science.

In 2024, the Consortium for Battery Innovation joined a three-year US programme, led by Sandia with the support of five other national labs, to highlight how advanced lead batteries could be deployed as part of a range of technologies for long duration energy storage projects.

In 2025, PNNL won BCI’s annual innovation award for its Grid Storage Launchpad (GSL). The GSL is a new US national capability for speeding up energy storage research: it brings all phases of battery development and deployment cycle under one roof, ranging from fundamental materials and device prototyping through to 100kW-400kW scale testing and validation.

Also last year, BCI announced that it had taken part in talks at PNNL focused on support for next-generation grid-scale battery storage tech.