NREL Hosting the 12th Annual Beyond Lithium-Ion Symposium Focused on Transformational Advances in Energy Storage Technologies
Scientists and Engineers to Discuss Ways to Surpass Current State-of-the-Art for Transportation and Electrical Grid Applications
On June 25-27, leading researchers and manufacturers will meet at the Denver Marriott West in Golden, Colorado, to deliberate on the future of scalable energy storage. The 12th Beyond Lithium-Ion (BLI) Symposium will focus on mapping out the future of energy storage technologies for transportation and the electrical grid.
This meeting is one in a successive series of symposiums organized by a consortium of U.S. national laboratories—Argonne, Pacific Northwest, Lawrence Berkeley, National Renewable, and Oak Ridge—NASA, and IBM Research that looks at technologies beyond lithium-ion batteries.
Along with presentations from key researchers in the field, Martin Keller, director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will deliver the keynote address on the opening day of the symposium. His presentation will take a deep dive into the impacts of global mega trends on America’s energy future, the declining costs for renewables and batteries driving significant changes to national grid and transportation systems, and NREL's advanced scientific research on transforming energy and the role energy storage plays in this effort.
“This year’s symposium provides an exciting opportunity for NREL to bring researchers from across the board together for a singular purpose,” said Tony Burrell, materials science research adviser at NREL and BLI XII program committee member. “It is a perfect match for what we do and what we aim for here at NREL.”
Serving this year as the BLI general chair, Ahmad Pesaran, NREL’s chief energy storage engineer, has stepped in for Chunmei Ban who left NREL in March for a faculty position at the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech.
“Chunmei’s continued engagement and collaboration with the symposium program committee has produced a strong technical program.,” said Pesaran. “As the symposium is being held five minutes from NREL, we look forward to a strong participation from NREL researchers and Colorado battery companies.”
NREL’s Gao Liu, Sang-Don Han, and Ying Shi are supporting this year’s program committee along with partners from the organizing consortium. The longstanding collaboration promotes and supports innovative ideas and networking opportunities for the participants. Linda Stolmack of NREL’s Chemistry and Nanoscience Center is leading the activities for smooth execution of the meeting.
This year, invited speakers will engage in open-format discussions to tackle the topics of critically necessary materials, new chemistry, diagnostics, scaling, and manufacturing issues that impede better energy storage performance. The goal of the three-day symposium is to accelerate innovation, reduce costs, and improve the safety of advanced electrochemical energy storage concepts and beyond lithium-ion.
Symposium themes include:
- Reviewing groundbreaking technical progress
- Exploring future directions
- Understanding critical challenges that are impeding progress.
Registration is still open for BLI XII. The deadline for poster submissions has been extended to June 15—submit your abstract today.