How discovery happens here
§03 / impact story
The question
Can a cheap, abundant material store a summer of sunshine for winter?
Lithium is scarce and costly. A team asked whether iron — rusting and un-rusting on command — could hold grid-scale energy instead.
Why it matters
Clean grids need cheap, long storage
Without it, solar and wind stall after dark. Storage is the bottleneck between today's grid and a decarbonized one.
The team
Five fields, one bench
Electrochemists, a materials modeler, a power-systems engineer, an economist, and two undergraduate researchers — a mix only possible across schools.
The discovery
A reversible iron-air cell that lasts
A prototype held charge across thousands of cycles at a fraction of lithium's cost — promising for multi-day storage.
What's next
From bench to substation
A pilot with a regional utility, and a policy study on what it would take to deploy. Illustrative demonstration content.