The storage of electricity produced by intermittent renewable sources is the bottleneck of the transition towards a fully green energy landscape. Besides technical suitability, the stationary storage with battery technologies applied to buffer the temporal mismatch between electricity production and demand have to comply with very tight economic constraints to be competitive with fossil fuel combustion technologies, to allow for further nurturing of a sustainable energy transition. Moreover, sensitive aspects concerning the secured supply of critical raw materials and the strategic technological independence are now at the forefront of the discussions and need to be addressed natively to any battery technology to be developed. The consortium for ZABSES project brings the partners together from both sides of the Rhine; and proposes to setup the basis for an innovative European-based practical solution. The ZABSES project aims at demonstrating that a rechargeable alkaline zinc – air battery (ZAB) technology, being made of abundant, environmentally friendly, intrinsically safe and robust materials, without issues for recycling step and presenting auspicious life cycle costs, could be more advantageous than state-of-the-art Li-ion batteries for the stationary electricity storage. The objective of this project is to demonstrate, with the construction of a prototype (TRL 4), that such battery technology will fulfil requirements in terms of load profiles for the energy storage for residential and grid renewable production. This objective relies on promising preliminary results already gained by the partners involved in the project namely: (i) from Sunergy a solution for the zinc electrode based on the development of a NiZn battery, making 2000 cycles at 100% depth of discharge, and a zinc electrode for ZAB with a surface capacity up to 400 mAh·cm-2, (ii) a consolidated approach for bi-functional air electrode with 150 load cycles at 10 mA/cm2 (and during 2h charge and 2h discharge)in half cell tests, from ZSW. Starting from TRL 2-3, bi-functional air cathode charge-discharge capability has to be improved greatly. An iterative and integrated approach, joining experiment and modelling, will be adopted to develop cutting-edge materials and electrode architecting, to secure the output and to unveil a deeper understanding of electrode processes down to the atomic scale level, this within the framework of battery cell prototype. The French-German consortium gathers together the University of Cergy-Pontoise’s laboratory LPPI (France), the non-profit research institution ZSW (Germany) at the interface between University and Industry, the R&D SME Sunergy (France), the Research Institute Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt / Helmholtz-Institut Ulm (Germany) and the company Varta Microbattery GmbH for a concerted development of a performant rechargeable ZAB prototype.

Electrochemical energy storage (EES) is crucial in the carbon-neutral future. Nevertheless, the current battery value chain has significant risks, especially concerning the supply of critical raw materials. eNargiZinc aims at developing new knowledge, technology and commercially exploitable products related to innovative and affordable next-generation EES devices, targeting long-term sustainability through the use of abundant and renewable materials and low environmental-impact production processes. A rigorous training-through-research programme for eleven Doctoral Candidates (DCs)—eight DCs funded by the EU and three DCs funded by the UK national funding agency (UKRI)—has been designed through an interdisciplinary and intersectoral approach, involving studies on all the essential parts needed to develop sodium-ion batteries, zinc-air batteries, and zinc-ion batteries/supercapacitors. The research within eNargiZinc will focus on developing sustainable electrode materials (biomass-derived carbons and their composites, redox-active polymers, hybrid transition metal oxides, and interphases for anode-less concepts), electrolytes (solid-state and gel-polymer types), and, especially, on integrating all the developed components into full cells at an industrially-relevant scale. A Personalised Training Package for each DC will be tailored to allow them to acquire the required skills over the three years of employment within the network. To this aim, secondments to other partners (especially in the non-academic sector), training in complementary skills, and network-wide training events will be implemented. The consortium, which is composed of six beneficiaries and twelve associated partners, is addressed to achieve the objectives of eNargiZinc and is based on excellence, synergy and complementarity. Industrial partners will play a key role in the network, by providing the DCs with exposure to the private sector and access to industrially-relevant facilities, which are essential to validate the findings obtained at lab-scale.