WASHINGTON – US Senator Charles Schumer called on the United States Department of Energy to approve a $120 million funding package for an electric battery hub in New York that has the potential to create new manufacturing jobs in Upstate New York, at places like General Electric and IBM.  

The Brookhaven National Laboratory-Stony Brook University-Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute electric battery hub has the potential to create new manufacturing jobs in upstate New York if the research hub is able to make a major scientific breakthrough to extend the life of commercial battery technology. Faculty members from RPI would work on research on Materials Characterization and system engineering for the manufacturing aspect of battery technology. 

Schumer pointed to past research from Brookhaven National Lab that allowed GE to build a new manufacturing operation in Schenectady, to produce the new “Durathon” battery, which will eventually lead to the creation of 300 new jobs. In addition to creating new technologies to improve energy storage on our electrical grid, the project could revolutionize the electric vehicle market by creating refined batteries for electric cars that are more efficient than any battery currently on the market. Schumer made the case that the American electric vehicle market has been slow to take off because of the power and efficiency limitations of exiting batteries. 

“Upstate New York has the manufacturing capacity to revolutionize the automobile industry, and I am supporting this project with the Department of Energy to fund a New York electric battery research hub that will develop the research to set those wheels in motion,” said Schumer. “The Brookhaven Laboratory-Stony Brook University-RPI battery hub has the expertise, research facilities, and the tools to revolutionize the electric vehicle market, and now we need to provide the resources to turn this expertise into a reality for the American automobile and commercial battery markets. We have seen this work in the past: research conducted at Brookhaven helped GE build a new operation in Schenectady, where it will produce a new battery and create an estimated 300 jobs. The funding package we are working on securing could certainly do that again and create new manufacturing jobs in upstate New York, pending a major breakthrough, and I’m going to do everything I can to repeat that success story.”

The partnership between Brookhaven and Stony Brook will also include RPI, Cornell, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, General Electric, IBM, NYSERDA, and the New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology (NYBEST), a consortium of over 100 entities in the battery sector, to focus on electrochemical energy storage from research to commercialization.  NY-BEST is currently establishing an advanced energy storage Commercialization Center in Rochester at the Eastman Business Park.

Schumer pointed out that the development of an electric battery hub at Stony Brook would make Long Island an international center of excellence for clean battery development, which could have a ripple effect on manufacturing in Upstate New York. The electric car market in the United States has not taken off as anticipated, in large part because of consumer concerns over the efficiency of existing batteries and their limited lifetime.