From electric cars, trains and light aircraft to stationary energy storage and charging stations, batteries of the future must be better designed for their specific purpose and more sustainable. Today the majority are imported from Asia, but the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has funded the umbrella initiative “Battery Research Factory” with the aim of making electric batteries more energy- and material-efficient and ultimately moving production to Germany.

In April, the “greenBatt” and “BattNutzung” competence clusters launched, two of the seven Factory initiatives. The first brings together researchers from no less than 34 departments at a number of German institutes and universities in order to build the foundations for sustainable electromobility. Their combined mission is to create “closed loop” battery lifecycles, making them as material-efficient as possible and developing more effective recycling technologies so that valuable materials can be recovered and reused.

The second cluster, BattNutzung (Battery Utilisation Concepts), will develop new battery design concepts tailored to different applications. The use-cases are divided into automobiles, flying objects, rail vehicles, indoor logistics, agriculture and construction, and stationary applications: for example, photovoltaic home storage, grid storage, UPS systems and charging stations for electromobility. At the same time, the cluster will look at extending the lifetime of batteries and possible second-use applications.

BattNutzung brings 29 project partners together across 13 projects over the next 3 years and has been funded with EUR 20 million from BMBF. While greenBatt has received EUR 30 million in funding.