Lab will play key role in upcoming battery summit

Five Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) employees, including Director Bill Goldstein, will play key roles in the sixth annual Bay Area Battery Summit (BABS) slated to be held virtually next week.

This year’s sixth annual BABS, co-sponsored by LLNL, New Energy Nexus and CalCharge, will draw together investors, policymakers, researchers and entrepreneurs with an interest in energy storage innovation.

The two-day conference, set for Nov. 17-18, will focus on the implementation of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Storage Grand Challenge (ESGC) to create and sustain global leadership in storage utilization.

“We are very excited to be hosting this year’s Bay Area Battery Summit with New Energy Nexus,” said Tony van Buuren, the deputy division leader for science and technology in the Lab’s Materials Science Division.

“BABS is a tremendous opportunity to showcase LLNL innovations in energy storage with stakeholders from the Bay Area, California and across the country. Continued innovation in battery storage is key to the future of sustainable energy.”

On Nov. 17, Goldstein will deliver a welcome address to the conference participants, and van Buuren will be a panelist for the “California Leads: Technologies Development and Transition in Energy Storage and Batteries” session.

Van Buuren will talk about LLNL’s capabilities for battery research and development, as well as provide overviews of the Laboratory for Energy Application for the Future, the Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory and high-performance computing for energy materials.

Another opening-day LLNL participant, Bill Bourcier, will be part of the “Lithium Valley: Supercharging the Value Chain in California and Across the Nation” session.

On the conference’s second day, two other Lab employees, Brandon Wood and John Grosh, will participate on the “Facility Flexibility, Efficiency and Value Enhancement” panel.

Wood, the associate program leader for Hydrogen and Computational Energy Materials in the Materials Science Division, will be the moderator, and Grosh Computing deputy associate director, Mission Development, will be a panelist.

Lab chemist Michael Stadermann will run the poster sessions for BABS and other LLNL scientists will be presenting posters at the event.

On Nov. 17, panels will highlight existing funding, consortia and other resources available to accelerate the commercialization of the energy storage technologies from ESGC and beyond.

On Nov. 18, using three energy storage-use cases particularly relevant for California as guideposts, technology vendors/developers, buyers, financiers and ecosystem facilitators will share successes and discover the problem areas and regional needs for closing a deal in each use case.

Also, on Nov. 18, Stanley Whittingham of Binghamton University, who is a State University of New York distinguished professor and 2019 Nobel laureate, will present a closing keynote address.

The focus of the BABS conference is on the development of batteries for transportation applications, such as cars and buses, and for grid storage.

New Energy Nexus is an international nonprofit that supports clean-energy entrepreneurs with funds, accelerators and networks. The organization started in California and operates programs in China, India, Southeast Asia and East Africa.

CalCharge is a battery and electro-chemical energy storage program comprised of startups and established companies, research institutions, laboratories and other groups.

Visit the BABS website or contact vanbuuren1 [at] llnl.gov (Tony van Buuren) for more information.