Despite the coronavirus challenges, JCESR continues to push the frontier of energy storage science as we telecommute from home, like much of the nation. We are turning our attention to computation, data analysis and paper writing which continues at a normal or higher pace, enabled by email, Zoom, BlueJeans, Webex and other video conferencing tools.

We expect the lack of access to experimental laboratories to have a modest impact on our workflow and progress for the first few weeks, after which we will have to revisit the timelines for our milestones. This will be a good time to make strategic plans for our future JCESR trajectory—new collaborations, new approaches, new learnings from overlooked existing knowledge—to take our work to the next level over the next three years.

JCESR’s spirit and resourcefulness showed through in our highly successful regional event, “Energy Storage in the Mountain West”, co-hosted with Idaho National Laboratory on March 18, 2020 which we converted from in-person to virtual and which attracted 70 participants across industry and academia for a robust discussion. This notable virtual event serves as a model for how we plan to continue JCESR’s momentum while telecommuting.

Claiming the energy storage frontier now will produce dramatic returns in innovation, battery manufacturing, economic growth and international leadership for the next twenty or more years.

We are rapidly advancing AI and machine learning for the discovery of new battery materials for organic liquid, polymer, and solid-state electrolytes, and for reaction genomes that predict the composition, structure, and function of interfaces at the atomic and molecular level.

We continue to train the next generation of battery scientists in frontier battery science and technology. Over 100 new postdocs and graduate students trained by JCESR are now in academia, industry, and government, an additional 100 will be trained in the next three years. Our postdocs experience first-hand the highly interactive, strategically planned and outcome-driven research environment of JCESR and bring it to industry and the research community.

Battery science and technology continue to be central to emerging transformations in energy generation, distribution and use in transportation, the electricity grid, and decarbonization of the economy. Claiming the energy storage frontier now will produce dramatic returns in innovation, battery manufacturing, economic growth and international leadership for the next twenty or more years.

The foundation that JCESR is building now will be the bedrock of tomorrow’s energy and transportation systems.

 

Stay well,

George Crabtree