One year ago Tesla Motors announced plans to build its Gigafactory to produce huge numbers of batteries, giving life to the old saying, “if you want something done right, do it yourself.”

By making electric car batteries that Tesla used to buy from others, CEO Elon Musk adopted a strategy made famous by Henry Ford – build a vertically integrated company that controls the many stages of production. By integrating “backward” into its supply chain, Musk is betting Tesla can improve the performance and lower the costs of batteries for its vehicles.

Now, Musk wants Tesla to acquire SolarCity for similar reasons, but with a slightly different twist.

SolarCity is one of the largest installers of solar photovoltaic panels, with some 300,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers in 27 states. The proposed merger with SolarCity would vertically integrate Tesla forward, as opposed to backward, into the supply chain. That is, when people come to Tesla stores to buy a vehicle, they will be able to arrange installation of solar panels – and potentially home batteries – at the same time.

This latest move would bring Tesla one step closer to being the fully integrated provider of sustainable energy solutions for the masses that Elon Musk envisions. But does it make business sense?

The real issue in my mind comes down to batteries and innovation.

Creating demand and scale

Although installing batteries is not a big part of SolarCity’s current business, the company is a potentially large consumer of Tesla’s batteries from the Gigafactory. Tesla makes Powerwall batteries for homes and larger Powerpack systems for commercial and industrial customers.

Any increase in the flow of batteries through the factory gives Tesla better economies of scale and potential for innovation. Innovation comes with the accumulated experience gained from building a key component of its electric vehicles as well as Tesla’s energy storage systems. As the company manufactures more batteries, it will find ways to innovate around battery design and production.

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Last week, Samsung ordered a global recall of its Galaxy Note 7 phones after investigations into claims of exploding devices revealed faulty lithium-ion batteries. Now, the FAA is strongly urging passengers to forge bringing the device on airliners due to safety risks.

Earlier this year, we spoke to ECS member K.M. Abraham about lithium-ion battery devices and safety concerns associated with them.

“It is safe to say that these well-publicized hazardous events are rooted in the uncontrolled release of the large amount of energy stored in Li-ion batteries as a result of manufacturing defects, inferior active and inactive materials used to build cells and battery packs, substandard manufacturing and quality control practices by a small fraction of cell manufacturers, and user abuses of overcharge and over-discharge, short-circuit, external thermal shocks and violent mechanical impacts,” Abraham said. “Safety hazards of Li-ion batteries occur when the fundamental principle of controlled release of energy on which battery technology is based is compromised by materials and manufacturing defects and operational abuses.”

Read Abraham’s full paper on Li-ion safety and building better batteries.

Interest in electric and hybrid vehicles continues to grow across the globe. The world economy saw EV sales go from around 315,000 in 2014 to 536,000 in 2015, and trends so far for 2016 show that the number of vehicles sold this year is on track to far exceed numbers we’ve seen in previous years.

Moving EVs forward

But in order to make these cars, there needs to be an energy storage source that is not only sustainable, but cheap to produce, with high efficiency, and can be easily mass produced. One of the leading contenders in that race has become fuel cell technology.

In recent years, new materials and better heat management processes have advanced fuel cells. Now, researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s NERSC center (including ECS Fellow Radoslav Adzic and ECS member Kotaro Sasaki) are putting their chips on polymer electrolyte fuel cells (PEFCs) to be at the forefront of fuel cell technology due recent finds. In a new study, the group showed that PEFCs could be made to run more efficiently and produced more cost-effectively by reducing the amount of a single key ingredient: platinum.

Laboratory curiosity

While fuel cells date back to 1839, they spent a majority of their existence as laboratory curiosities. It wasn’t until the 1950s when fuel cells finally made their way to the main stage, eventually going on to power the Gemini and Apollo space flights in the 1960s.

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An interdisciplinary team made up of researchers from Stanford University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory recently developed a new catalyst that carries out a solar-powered reaction 100 times faster than ever before.

Additionally, the catalyst’s performance improves as time goes on and it can stand up to intense, acidic conditions. In creating the catalyst, the researchers used less iridium than would typically be used, potentially lowering the cost to produce hydrogen or carbon-based fuels that could power a range of renewable, sustainable alternatives.

This from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory:

The discovery of the catalyst – a very thin film of iridium oxide layered on top of strontium iridium oxide – was the result of an extensive search by three groups of experts for a more efficient way to accelerate the oxygen evolution reaction, or OER, which is half of a two-step process for splitting water with sunlight.

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Carbon dioxide emissions account for 80 percent of all greenhouse gases pumped into the environment, totaling in at a staggering 40 tons of CO₂ currently emitted from burning fossil fuels. In a response to the high levels of CO₂, which have been linked to the accelerating rates in climate change, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has called for a 30 percent decrease in emissions of the power sector. Former ECS member Susan Rempe is looking to help the sector achieve that goal through the development of the CO₂ Memzyme.

Researchers claim the Memzyme is the only cost-effective way to capture and process CO₂. Further, the team states that the Memzyme — which is a membrane with an active layer holding an enzyme — has prefect selectivity.

The development could help capture CO₂ from coal-fired power plants and is 10 times thinner than a soap bubble.

With hydrogen power stations in California, a new Japanese consumer car and portable hydrogen fuel cells for electronics, hydrogen as a zero emission fuel source is now finally becoming a reality for the average consumer. When combined with oxygen in the presence of a catalyst, hydrogen releases energy and bonds with the oxygen to form water.

The two main difficulties preventing us from having hydrogen power everything we have are storage and production. At the moment, hydrogen production is energy-intensive and expensive. Normally, industrial production of hydrogen requires high temperatures, large facilities and an enormous amount of energy. In fact, it usually comes from fossil fuels like natural gas – and therefore isn’t actually a zero-emission fuel source. Making the process cheaper, efficient and sustainable would go a long way toward making hydrogen a more commonly used fuel.

An excellent – and abundant – source of hydrogen is water. But chemically, that requires reversing the reaction in which hydrogen releases energy when combining with other chemicals. That means we have to put energy into a compound, to get the hydrogen out. Maximizing the efficiency of this process would be significant progress toward a clean-energy future.

One method involves mixing water with a helpful chemical, a catalyst, to reduce the amount of energy needed to break the connections between hydrogen and oxygen atoms. There are several promising catalysts for hydrogen generation, including molybdenum sulfide, graphene and cadmium sulfate. My research focuses on modifying the molecular properties of molybdenum sulfide to make the reaction even more effective and more efficient.

Making hydrogen

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it’s rarely available as pure hydrogen. Rather, it combines with other elements to form a great many chemicals and compounds, such as organic solvents like methanol, and proteins in the human body. Its pure form, H₂, can used as a transportable and efficient fuel.

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Currently, electric vehicles depend on a complex interplay of batteries and supercapacitors to get you where you’re going. But a recently published paper, co-authored by ECS Fellow Hector Abruna, details the development of a new material that can take away some of the complexity of EVs.

“Our material combines the best of both worlds — the ability to store large amounts of electrical energy or charge, like a battery, and the ability to charge and discharge rapidly, like a supercapacitor,” says William Dichtel, lead author of the study.

This from Northwestern University:

[The research team] combined a COF — a strong, stiff polymer with an abundance of tiny pores suitable for storing energy — with a very conductive material to create the first modified redox-active COF that closes the gap with other older porous carbon-based electrodes.

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New research shows another step forward in the goal of developing energy storage systems robust enough to store such intermittent sources as wind and solar on a large-scale.

Their work explores the opportunities in solid oxide cells (SOCs), which the group believes to be one of the best prospects in energy storage due to their high efficiency and wide range of scales.

ECS member John Irvine and his team from the University of St. Andrews have set out to overcome traditional barriers in this technology, developing a new method of electrochemical switching to simplify the manufacturing of the electrodes needed to deliver high, long-lasting energy activity.

This from the University of St. Andrews:

The results demonstrate a new way to produce highly active and stable nanostructures – by growing electrode nanoarchitectures under operational conditions. This opens exciting new possibilities for activating or reinvigorating fuel cells during operation.

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Wood has been a key building block for much of history infrastructure. While we may have witnessed wood fade out in lieu of other materials in more recent times, it’s about to make a comeback in an unexpected way.

Past ECS member Liangbing Hu of the University of Maryland, College Park is developing a stronger, transparent wood that can be used in place of less environmentally friendly materials such as plastic.

But this development’s novelty really lies in the transparency factor. So many structures built today rely on the use of glass and steel. By replacing those building materials with the transparent wood, the world of design could be revolutionized while heating costs and fuel consumption rates are simultaneously reduced.

This from CNN:

Hu describes the process of creating clear wood in two steps: First, the lignin — an organic substance found in vascular plants — is chemically removed. This is the same step used in manufacturing pulp for paper. The lignin is responsible for the “yellow-ish” color of wood. The second step is to inject the channels, or veins of the wood by filling it with an epoxy — which can be thought of as strengthening agent, Hu says.

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The National Park Service, which oversees more than 400 sites across the country, celebrated its 100th birthday on Aug. 25, 2016. During the centennial anniversary, Popular Science caught up with Bill Nye to discuss how climate change is affecting these public lands and their inhabitants.

Bill Nye On Climate Change In Our National Parks by PopSciLearn more about what our scientists are doing to provide answers to growing global energy needs with clean, alternative solutions.