The FAIR Battery project recieves an 180 kEuro grant from the Center for Unusual Collaborations (CUCo). In this project, which started as a CUCo Spark, we are envisioning a world in which access to renewable energy is democratic, governed locally, and is built upon mutual exchange of knowledge and technology without exploitative transfer of natural resources. We plan to enhance the diffusion of knowledge on energy storage by structuring a design lab that prioritizes local needs and access to developing battery systems and uses open science to educate and enable a network of experts and end-users in choosing the best route for their locally sourced energy grids.

We also aim to create an open-source electrochemical battery (FAIR = Findable + Accessible + Interoperable + Reproducible) and make the platform radically accessible: 1- by deliberately using low cost and locally available materials suitable for local user groups, and 2- by setting up the education communities on top of the open-hardware design.

On this route, we thrive to not only provides the necessary technical details for engineering and production, but also incorporates the local constraints for actually adopting and using the technology. These constraints relate to language, availability of materials and expertise, maintenance capacity, or other locally varying conditions, which must be identified as part of the project. Our envisioned FAIR-Battery platform will track and seek to remove these constraints in each stage of the development by direct consultation with the user-groups.

This project is guided by an interdisciplinary team of researchers: Antoni Forner-Cuenca and Yali Tang (Technical University of Eindhoven), Maarten Voors and Stephanie Hobbis (Wageningen University), Peter Ngene, Toon Meelenm and myself (Utrecht University), which introduece themselves and our main goals in this short video.

Back in November 2021, the closely related FAIR-Battery knowledgebase project, recieved an Open Science Fund grant from the NWO.