The integrated project “Electrochemical and Thermal Storage Technologies” involves RSE, ENEA and CNR in the development of these technologies along the entire value chain.
 
For electrochemical storage, particular attention is being paid to raw material sourcing, tackling the critical issue of supply with innovative solutions (e.g., brine mining, eco-design and urban mining), and to the development of active materials, which account for 60% of the total cost of the technology and environmental and safety aspects. These activities combine higher-performance and more environmentally and economically sustainable anode, cathode and electrolyte materials, both for more mature technologies (lithium-ion and sodium batteries), to have reliable and established starting KPIs, and for frontier technologies, to improve and validate their performance with a view to developing a sustainable battery for the future. The project also addresses the topics of diagnostics, monitoring and control of batteries, in order to extend their useful life.
 
Thermal storage builds on the development of materials, technologies and processes to increase the energy density of the different solutions proposed, by ensuring greater stability and cyclability of materials, pursuing greater alignment between the charge and discharge times of the storage system and the process to which it is coupled (utility), while prioritizing economic and environmental aspects.
 
The project is strongly experimental, with most of the activities directed toward the creation of materials, prototypes and systems. The experiments are then supported by modeling applied to chemisms (computational analysis to define new formulations), process simulations, and environmental and economic analyses. This makes the project extremely robust in the validation of results.