**1. Introduction**

Solar photovoltaics and wind turbines have been the least expensive ways to generate electricity, however, with the increased maintenance requirements in these systems, the demand is shifting and growing towards maintenance-free electrochemical batteries [1]. This has resulted in the development of a wide variety of secondary storage battery chemistries and this demand increase is further supported by the decrease in their prices. For instance, the Lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery, which was once one of the most expensive chemistries with prices over \$450/kWh has seen a

reduction in per-kWh prices to as low as \$200. Berckmans et al. [2] predicts the price to drop down further to less than \$150/kWh (by 2030). In order to reduce greenhouse emissions from vehicles as well as firm renewables for smart city development, a cut above storage chemistry is needed [3]. Lifecycle (impact) assessment (LCA) is a metric to evaluate the equivalent emissions and the damage an energy storage system does to the environment. As defined in ISO 14040 and 14,044, the parameters required for LCA analysis include functional unit, system boundary, impact category, and a data source. Commonly used data sources include E.U. Ecoinvent database, and U.S. GREET. Using Argonne National Laboratory's BatPaC (Battery Performance and Cost) Model. Greenhouse gas emission (GHG), Human health (HH), Ecosystem quality (EQ), Resources depletion (RD), Cumulative water use (CWU), Global warming potential (GWP), Ecotoxicity (ET), Acidification (AD), Ozone depletion (OD), Photochemical smog (PS), Eutrophication (EP), and Cumulative energy demand (CED) are the commonly used impact categories for LCA analysis in literature.

Cradle-to-gate is a standard development period that is taken as the assessment term in this study. Cradle-to-gate along with use impact is also associated and sometimes proportional to the greenhouse gas emissions, which makes it an important evaluation factor for the application-specific storage chemistry assessment [4–9]. CED is a metric to identify the environmental burden (or the lifecycle impact) imposed by a commodity's production and/or its use. This metric, in MJ/kWh, would be used to evaluate the Cradle-to-gate with use impact of selected chemistries.

A technology readiness level chart of all 14 EV and RES (galvanic) electrochemical batteries discussed in this paper is shown in **Figure 1**. This gives an idea of the chemistries which had the potential of going through numerous research and development iterations. For instance, the Lead Acid (Pb-Acid) chemistry has had over 160 years since its discovery in 1859 to go through ameliorations. Charge holding capacity, time duration, and degradation abridging potential are the crucial appraising factors that have been improved upon for every other storage chemistry that is currently commercialized [10, 11]. Further study on improvement and discussions of these key topics are presented in the following sections. Section 2 discusses the electrochemical redox performance of these 14 chemistries and suggests the applicable upside and downside to their designs and developments. Section 3 provides mathematical formulations and results for sizing a battery, taking into consideration a case study of a 2000Kg EV as well as another case study of a hospital and a primary school's loads in Miami, Florida. Section 4 presents the Cradle-to-gate model for LCA of the sized battery chemistries for the EV, hospital, and primary school taking into consideration their electrochemical performance values as well. Section 5 concludes the paper with a scope for future work.

The key contributions of the paper are that it: (1) Provides a comprehensive technical categorization of batteries based on their electro-chemistry; (2) Provides energy storage sizing criteria and formulations for EV and RES systems; (3) Evaluates chemistry- and application-specific lifecycle performance of EV and RES batteries using cradle-to-gate method based formulations.
