Maxwell Helps Plan the Future of Energy Storage

Ultracapacitors are here to stay. Though unrecognized for their commercial viability for most of their technological lifetime, they are now being embraced by the commercial applications that they are so well-suited for.  And there’s much more to come. 

Last month, I was honored to represent Maxwell Technologies at a workshop in Washington D.C. on “Science for Energy Technologies” sponsored by the Basic Energy Sciences Program.  Part of the Office of Science at the Department of Energy, the program is aimed at fundamental research into the topic of energy technologies and energy use. The Advisory Committee of the BES is a visionary board that sponsors workshops and publishes technical papers on the outputs from these workshops and other activities. They are worth reading as they reveal deep scientific foundations for the future of scientific research on specific topics. 

With industry need at the forefront, the 100 or so participants, which included such companies as A123 spent a 48-hour blitz on the future of energy technologies. With subtopics ranging from solar energy through energy storage to carbon sequestration, small breakout groups of experts spent some quality time together conjuring up and defining the scientific need for advancing energy technology in each of nine topical areas. 

I participated in the session on energy storage.  It was an enlightening, productive and important couple of days on the future of energy storage. Identifying scientific need for energy storage is critical to our national priorities. While this workshop was a deep snapshot into the challenges at this time, there is much more to come and the committee and participants acknowledged this as an ongoing requirement for the future.   

The output from the session will be a volume of summary chapters in a publication directed at detailing the immediate scientific imperatives to carry the technology of energy storage over the next five years. In April the co-chairs of the committee will brief the Office of Science on the report and publishing will follow sometime in the future from there. The contributors are distinguished experts in their fields and the contributions captured in this report will be meaningful and useful in setting scientific direction in the near term and for the mid-term implementation of energy technology to the benefit of the United States and the world.  

This will be a publication worth reading and I encourage you to seek it out when it is published. I’ll make sure I link to it from my blog as well. 

Maxwell is honored to have been invited to participate in this forum. But it was not Maxwell that the Office of Science and Basic Energy Sciences was after. It was an informed perspective on energy storage that was summoned. Ultracapacitor technology is now considered by both scientific and commercial circles as critical to the future of energy technologies around the globe.