Energy Storage Moonshot

Energy storage is considered the holy grail that would unlock a
vast increase in solar and wind renewable electricity
generation. 


That’s the topic for the latest episode of Grid Talk featuring
Will McNamara who is a Grid Energy Policy Storage Analyst with
Sandia National Laboratories.


Six national energy labs and a cohort of 200 partners across the
energy industry have joined together in a moonshot effort to
vastly expand energy storage in America. It is all being
coordinated through the National Consortium for the Advancement
of Long Duration Energy Storage (LDES) technologies. 


“There was a proposal call issued by the Department of Energy
offering funds to the national labs to create an industry forum
focused on the many challenges that are facing long-duration
energy storage technologies and create this forum so that the
industry can come together and address these challenges,” said
McNamara 


The goal is to boost storage technology on a large scale from
about four hours duration to 10 hours.


“The sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow so we
need to find a way to store the energy to make it dispatchable,
hence the need for energy storage, so we are absolutely in this
evolutionary period. We are building the constructs for the
future.”


In his role as Grid Energy Storage Policy Analyst for Sandia
National Laboratories, McNamara focuses on energy storage policy
development at the federal and state levels. He has spent his
entire 23-year career in the energy and utilities industry with a
concentration on regulatory and legislative policy. 
Additional areas of subject matter expertise include distributed
energy resources, AMI/smart grid, renewables, and competitive
retail markets.


McNamara has an M.B.A. from University of Phoenix, an M.A. in
Mass Communications from the University of Iowa, and a B.A. in
Political Science and Journalism from the University of
Iowa.