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Le CNRS et ses partenaires contribuent à repenser les modes de production, de stockage et de sources d'énergie pour subvenir aux besoins énergétiques avec des technologies accessibles performantes et durable.

Né en 1953 à Marmande dans le Lot-et-Garonne, Jean-Marie Tarascon est un spécialiste de la chimie du solide et d'électrochimie. Membre de l'Académie des sciences depuis 2004, il intègre le Collège de France en 2014. Tout au long de sa carrière, il a su mener de front recherches fondamentales et applications de ses travaux, sans jamais faire de concession à l'excellence scientifique. Directeur du laboratoire Chimie du solide et de l'énergie (CNRS/Collège de France/Sorbonne Université), à…

Le 200ème laboratoire commun du CNRS, lancé fin novembre 2021, est le CR2ME : Centre de résonance magnétique électronique pour les matériaux et l'énergie. Ce nouveau Labcom est développé avec le groupe TotalEnergies et le laboratoire de spectroscopie pour les interactions, la réactivité et l'environnement (Lasire - CNRS/Université de Lille) pour développer des énergies nouvelles dans une optique de développement durable. C'est pour aller au coeur de la…

Flexible solar cells that are a thousand times thinner than commercial silicon cells, and have the same efficiency: this is the accomplishment of two CNRS researchers who have developed a trap to "capture" light. Applying this technology to mobile objects could change our daily lives, as explained in this report.

A l'occasion de sa deuxième participation à VivaTech, le rendez-vous européen consacré à l'innovation technologique, le CNRS présente un échantillon de son savoir-faire dans la deeptech à travers différentes start-up issues de ses laboratoires. Trois défis principaux se présentent pour la filière hydrogène : produire de l'hydrogène sans utiliser d'énergie fossile, le stocker en grands et petits volumes et le convertir en énergie. Deux start-up tentent de relever les défis :…

Alors que les piles à hydrogène se répandent de plus en plus dans le secteur de l'énergie et des transports, de nombreux travaux sont menés pour les rendre plus performantes et compétitives. Ceux de Daniel Hissel, professeur à l'université de Franche-Comté et membre du laboratoire FEMTO-ST, font référence. Son objectif : intégrer ces convertisseurs d'énergie dans de nouvelles applications et concevoir des outils pour leur diagnostic en temps réel. « Nos…

Sophie Brouard, Daniel Hissel, Arnaud Landragin and Franck Molina are the CNRS 2020 Innovation Medallists. Since 2011, the CNRS Innovation Medal rewards figures whose exceptional research work has led to groundbreaking innovation in the technological, economic, therapeutic, and social fields. The career paths of the four CNRS 2020 Innovation medallists illustrate the quality, variety, and wealth of research conducted at the CNRS, as well as the different ways of…

What if we could power our vehicles with powdered metals? Aluminum and magnesium have the same energy density as fossil fuels and the waste - metal oxydes - can be recycled with concentrated solar energy.

Tiamat designs, develops, and produces sodium-ion batteries in a standard industrial format. These batteries could mitigate some of the limitations of the lithium-ion batteries that currently prevail, such as charging speed, lifespan, and the cost of production. Located in Amiens (northern France), this young company emerged from the French Research Network on Electrochemical Energy Storage (RS2E) led by the CNRS, and now has a few dozen functional prototypes available. Some of them, including…

From the birth of physicist Pierre Auger to the creation of CERN in 1952, this film tells the story of four great French physicists. Pierre Auger, Bertrand Goldschmidt, Jacques Labeyrie and Georges Charpak tell us about their career, their work and the personalities they met and worked with. A history of nuclear power in France unfolds throughout their interviews supported by numerous archive images. As a result of the work of Pierre Auger and Bertrand Goldschmidt, which had led to the creation…

Upon being awarded the 2017 CNRS Innovation Medal, Jean-Marie talks about his career and his taste for transmission and collaboration with younger generation researchers. Being a professor at the Collège de France and a specialist of solid-state electrochemistry, he is also the director of the solid-state and energy laboratory (laboratoire Chimie du solide et de l'énergie, a CNRS/Collège de France/Pierre and Marie-Curie University joint research unit). He first started to draw attention to…

To address the societal concerns raised by the impact of natural and artificial radioactivity on humans and the environment, seven laboratories of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics (IN2P3) of the CNRS have pooled their resources to create a national platform for radioactivity analysis: the Becquerel Network. Patrick Chardon and Addil Sellam who are engineers in two of the seven network member laboratories explain its advantages. Enabling on-site interventions,…

In a context of economic crisis and fossil energy scarcity, finding natural and renewable energy resources has become essential for large urban areas. But it is still necessary to be able to combine energy capture and restitution systems. The short-term solution lies in a global overhaul of the production-consumption cycle and the coordination of all energy supply sources and user needs into new-generation utilities. What are the natural energies that could be exploited on a city scale? What…

With the short-term depletion of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, coal, etc...) and the deterioration of our environment looming, the use of renewable power sources is becoming essential. The energy transition has thus become one of the major technological and scientific challenges of the 21st century, with non-carbon renewable power sources representing a major alternative to fossil fuels. However, their exceptional potential is strongly offset by the storage problems caused by the intermittent…

To face the last of the fossil fuels stocks, Franck Dumeignil, a chemist, coordinates the Eurobioref project. It gathers research centers and manufacturers from fourteen countries. Its concept is based on the principle of an integrated and flexible biorefinery, which allows to link the preoccupations of agriculture and chemical industry.

Today, an hour of sunlight on Earth is the equivalent of the worldwide energy consummation on a year. In this short film, Daniel Lincot, a researcher from the LECIME (Laboratory for Electrochemistry, Interfaces Chemistry and Modelizations for Energy), explains the exploitable potential everywhere in the world, where chemists play an important role in the conception of solar panels.

Batteries are devices able to transform chemical energies into electric energies. Actual research allows to glimpse an amelioration of the stocking capacity of a scale factor of two even a scale factor of three, in a decade or two. In this short film, Jean-Marie Tarascon from the “Laboratory for reactivity and solids chemistry” (LRCS) explains these new techniques.

Daniel Lincot, a researcher from the “Laboratory for electrochemistry, chemistry of interfaces and modeling for energy” (LECIME), evokes the dozen of existing photovoltaic industries. A few are exploited, as the silicon solar cells, but new cells have appeared as the thin films or the dye-sensitized solar cell. The aim is to decrease the costs and to facilitate the recycling.

Within the frame of the sustainable development, researchers try to develop batteries inspired by the living chemistry. In this short film, Jean-Marie Tarascon from the LRCS (Laboratory for reactivity and solids chemistry) describes these researches.

The use of fossil fuels takes part in the increase of greenhouse gases, and influences on the climate. Transports, especially cars, play an important part in this pollution. Thinking about the place of clean energies in tomorrow energetic choices is getting more and more necessary. This film gives an overview of the French research on hydrogen energy, applied to transports. It shows obstacles to the emergence of a mass market for hydrogen cars, solutions that loom in the laboratories and life…

To what extent is photovoltaic energy used in France today? This film looks at various initiatives in progress. Photovoltaic energy from the sun is not just a pipe dream; combining chemistry and physics, it is a field with great potential, which is already being commercially developed. This new energy source is obtained by converting light from the sun into electricity in semi-conductor materials like silicon. The end goal is to produce photovoltaic modules cheaply and increase their…

The solar power plant Themis, located in the department of the Pyrénées-Orientales (France), was initially closed in 1986, but it gets back into action thanks to the Pegasus Project.

Alain Prinzhoferis a geochemist at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (Paris geophysical institute - IPGP) and he describes the new sources of energy. Deep at the bottom of the oceans, where continental plates are drifting apart, scientists have discovered sources of hydrogen gas. This gas is of great interest to researchers because it is a particularly clean source of energy. One may wonder if it has a future. Could it stand a chance to replace oil?

Alain Prinzhofer is a geochemist at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (Paris geophysical institute - IPGP) and he explains why the price of raw materials is rising more than that of the oil barrel. Why, for example, has copper or helium become so expensive? Have we already exhausted all the resources of our planet? Can we still hope to discover new mines and new deposits?

Alain Prinzhofer is a geochemist at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (Paris geophysical institute - IPGP), and he wonders how long it will take for Humanity to exhaust the reserves that our planet has taken millions of years to build-up. Where are our remaining oil, coal and natural gas stocks? Do researchers already have any idea on how to replace these fossil fuels when they become scarce?

For the first edition of the Cinémascience festival in Bordeaux a laboratory in Aquitaine is in the spotlight with Claude Delmas, as the director of the Institut de chimie de la matière condensée de Bordeaux (Bordeaux institute for condensed matter chemistry - ICMCB) presenting its activities. The ICMCB studies the properties of solid materials. Issues related to energy and the environment constitute one of its research lines. Jean-Claude Grenier works on fuel cells. Unlike conventional…

Pendulum and bagpipe! Alain Clément, a researcher at the Laboratory for fluids mechanics in Nantes, was inspired by these two instruments when he conceived the “SEAREV”, a machine made for converting the wave energy into electricity.