Looking Ahead
This is a critical moment for our climate and the energy system. Learn why academic-industry partnerships are essential to making ubiquitous renewable energy a reality.
By Dan Steingart
As it stands today, we have deployed electrochemistry at megawatt scale. Roughly speaking, that’s enough to power 10,000 homes, several large hospitals, or a midsized data center.
Our task now is to solve the challenges of deploying electrochemical energy at gigawatt and terawatt scale — without subsidies or higher prices.
When I speak to industry leaders about the progress being made in electrifying the energy system, they answer with a laundry list of open questions. It turns out that doing electrochemistry at scale requires overcoming many challenges. Industry needs de-risked solutions.
Industry researchers can optimize equations, but it’s up to academics to figure out what equations at these scales even look like. That’s why industrial-academic partnerships, like those we have at CEEC, are so important. We are home to dozens of PhD students and postdocs — and more than a hundred MS and undergraduate students — who work with our core faculty to develop practical solutions to vexing problems.
What we envision for the future is a large working lab at one of Columbia’s suburban campuses, where we can build reactors at some scale to understand what electrochemistry moving toward gigawatt-hour implementations can look like.
Our researchers work on electrochemistry at every scale — from the electron to the power grid — with funding from federal agencies, industry partners, and philanthropic organizations. CEEC recently joined a $62.5 million hub for innovative research on energy storage. Lauren Marbella and I are working with colleagues at MIT to develop new electrolyte designs and generate new chemical states to build novel electrolyte materials that will improve the energy storage of batteries.
This is a crucial moment for the energy system and the planet. There is no time to waste in developing the many technologies necessary for drastically reducing the amount of fossil fuels that we require as a global society.
If you’re interested in joining CEEC on our mission, please contact Executive Director Jeff Fitts at [email protected].
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Dan Steingart |