Department of Energy awards $5 million for Binghamton University research to advance long-duration energy storage

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded Binghamton University and its industry partners $5 million to develop and demonstrate a 10-hour energy storage system designed to improve the resilience and efficiency of critical facilities.

Associate Professor Ziang “John” Zhang from the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering will lead the project. ECE Assistant Professor Zixiao Ma will contribute to the project as co-principal investigator. The team also includes collaborators from Electrovaya USA, LiiON, Eaton Corp., and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The team will design and demonstrate a 100-kilowatt, 1.2-megawatt-hour battery system designed for extended cycle life and improved safety compared to conventional technologies. The system will be deployed at Binghamton University’s Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems (ES2), where it will support a live data center environment with controllable computational loads. The project team plans to install the battery system in a specially designed container that will include real-time monitoring, remote shutdown, and fire-suppression systems.

Zhang said the project has two main objectives: “Our goal is to demonstrate that energy storage systems can both enhance resilience and support cost-effective and flexible operation of critical facilities like data centers. By using storage to manage peak demand and provide backup power, we can reduce infrastructure costs while strengthening grid resilience.”

For example, a facility that typically requires 1 megawatt but occasionally peaks at 2 megawatts could use energy storage to meet those short-duration spikes, avoiding costly upgrades to the local grid infrastructure.

The project builds on Binghamton University’s leadership in energy systems research. The ES2 data center will provide a real-world testing environment, enabling the team to evaluate system performance under realistic operating conditions. The project also leverages the New Energy New York (NENY) ecosystem, which connects academic research with industry partners such as Electrovaya.

The award is part of the Critical Facility Energy Resilience (CiFER) program from the Office of Electricity, which funds the advancement of innovative storage technologies at a host site with identified resiliency needs, from early-stage research and development to widespread commercialization. The project is also designed to create a scalable model for deploying advanced energy storage systems across critical infrastructure nationwide.

The project comes at a time when rapid growth in artificial intelligence and data centers is placing unprecedented strain on U.S. power infrastructure. Systems like this could help bridge the gap between rapidly growing demand and limited grid capacity.

“While the concept of using energy storage to manage demand is not new, this project provides a unique opportunity to demonstrate it at scale in a real-world setting,” Zhang said. “By leveraging Binghamton’s ES2 facility and the New Energy New York ecosystem, we aim to show how advanced storage systems can safely improve both facility resilience and overall grid efficiency.”