Beauty in Imperfection

Redox-site engineering at the molecular level holds great promise in the exploration of advanced electrode materials for energy-storage devices. In this issue of Joule, Yijin Liu and colleagues derived a novel nickel-cobalt (NiCo) layered double hydroxide (LDH) electrode of high energy and powder density via electrochemically driven phase-transformation of a NiCo carbonate hydroxide. The dynamic synthesis process resulted in a LDH electrode that is oxygen vacancy enriched and contains abundant, unique 5-coordinated Co redox active sites with extraordinary fast reaction kinetics.