University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego)

Methods for storing electricity for the electric power system (i.e. the grid) are developing rapidly, but widespread adoption of these technologies requires real-world data about their performance, economic benefit, and long-term reliability. The CHARGES program, short for “Cycling Hardware to Analyze and Ready Grid-Scale Electricity Storage,” establishes two sites where ARPA-E-funded battery technologies will be tested under conditions designed to represent not just today’s applications, but also the demands of tomorrow’s electric power system. The program will establish realistic duty cycles for storage devices on a microgrid, and test them in both a controlled environment and under realistic microgrid operating conditions. The objective of the CHARGES program is to accelerate the commercialization of electrochemical energy storage systems developed in current and past ARPA-E-funded research efforts. The program aims to help ARPA-E-funded battery development teams improve their storage technologies to deliver substantial economic benefit under real-world conditions, both now and in the future.

The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego) will conduct testing of existing ARPA-E energy storage technologies in both laboratory and grid-connected conditions. Home to one of the country’s largest microgrids, UC San Diego will apply its advanced understanding of microgrid operation in the California market to select and value applications for storage, in grid-connected and islanded conditions, and to develop duty cycles for energy storage in order to serve individual and stacked applications. UC San Diego plans to test cells and modules from ARPA-E-funded battery developers in its battery laboratories, and UC San Diego experts will assist ARPA-E battery developers in resolving issues and enhancing performance. Those batteries that perform well in laboratory testing using the selected duty cycles will then be deployed for extended testing on UC San Diego’s microgrid. This approach will allow UC San Diego to achieve test results that represent a wide spectrum of applications, determine system performance under a variety of conditions, and eventually generate initial performance data that can be shared with electric utilities and other potential grid storage buyers to inform them of the promise of early-stage storage technologies.

If successful, UC San Diego’s energy storage modeling, assessment, and testing systems could provide data on the economic value of ARPA-E-funded energy storage systems and encourage expanded adoption of energy storage systems.