The Office of Electricity’s (OE) Energy Storage Division accelerates bi-directional electrical energy storage technologies as a key component of the future-ready grid. The Division supports applied materials development to identify safe, low-cost, and earth-abundant elements that enable cost-effective long-duration storage. The division also supports early adoption by improving storage reliability and safety, applying modeling and analysis, and validating performance for rapid commercialization.

The future grid will need to accommodate growing supply volatility from intermittent resources and quickly evolving fuel infrastructures, as well as increased demand-side functionality with distributed energy resources and the electrification of transportation, buildings, and industry. These trends will create significant new opportunities for technologies that decouple legacy dependencies and increase grid flexibility. These changes are accelerated by technical and economic forces, National and state policies, and recent legislation, including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. OE’s energy storage research and leadership roles in DOE’s cross-cutting collaboration efforts will ensure that grid-scale energy storage is able to meet the demands of this new era in electricity delivery.

• Energy Storage RD&D: Accelerates development of longer-duration grid storage technologies by increasing amounts of stored energy and operational durations, reducing technology costs, ensuring safe, long-term reliability, developing analytic models to find technical and economic benefits, as well as demonstrating how storage provides clean and equitable energy access for consumers and communities.
  • Rapid Operational Validation Initiative (ROVI): This initiative intends to address critical gaps in data needs to evaluate energy storage, such as the lack of access to large and uniform sets of performance data that are necessary to accelerate the pace at which technology development can occur. ROVI’s overall focus is to accelerate the time from lab to market for new energy storage technologies by employing data-driven tools to predict their operational lifetimes. 
• Grid Storage Launchpad: Provides access to DOE, multidisciplinary researchers, and industry to a world class research center to lower the barriers to innovation and deployment of grid-scale energy storage. The facility will enable independent testing of next-generation grid energy storage materials and systems under realistic grid operating conditions. The Launchpad will also accelerate the development of new technologies by propagating rigorous performance requirements.

• Energy Storage Grand Challenge: OE co-chairs this DOE-wide mechanism to increase America’s global leadership in energy storage by coordinating departmental activities on the development, commercialization, and use of next-generation energy storage technologies.
• Long-Duration Energy Storage Earthshot: Establishes a target to, within the decade, reduce the cost of grid-scale energy storage by 90% for systems that deliver 10+ hours of duration. OE supports a variety of technology pathways to achieve this aggressive goal.
  • Storage Innovations (SI) 2030: The objective of SI 2030 is to develop specific and quantifiable RD&D pathways to achieve the targets identified in the Long-Duration Storage Shot. On July 19, 2023, OE released the Long Duration Storage Shot Technology Strategy Assessments, which summarize the results from the SI 2030 stakeholder engagement process and explore promising RD&D pathways to substantially lower the costs of long-duration energy storage. On July 25, OE launched the $15 million SI Technology Liftoff funding opportunity announcement to accelerate partnerships and enable pre-competitive R&D projects that have the potential to benefit entire technology industries.

ERIC HSIEH, OE-30
DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY, ENERGY STORAGE

Eric Hsieh is Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Energy Storage Division in DOE’s Office of Electricity. He co-leads the crosscutting Energy Storage Grand Challenge and Long-Duration Storage Energy Earthshot and previously held positions at Nexans, A123 Systems, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Mr. Hsieh received degrees in Public Policy from UC Berkeley and Computer Science from MIT.

Mohamed Kamaludeen is the Director of Energy Storage Validation at the Office of Electricity (OE), U.S. Department of Energy. His team in OE leads the nation’s energy storage effort by validating and bringing technologies to market. This includes designing, executing, and evaluating a RD&D portfolio that accelerates commercial adoption of next-generation grid storage technologies. 

Dr. Caitlin Callaghan is the Director of Storage Materials & Systems. Her team evaluates and advances high-potential energy storage technologies to reach the prototype stage.  This includes identifying future supply chain and workforce requirements and leveraging DOE-wide efforts to serve expected deployment targets.