Fuel Cell Nation

TED 2012 and Batteries for the Smart Grid

As part of the pre-program reading material for my upcoming MIT Sloan Clean Energy Ventures class, we had a variety of required reading and video posts to review. One of the most interesting videos was the 2012 TED Talk of MIT's Professor Donald Sadoway, "The Missing Link to Renewable Energy". In the talk, he discusses reinventing the battery.

Without dumbing-down the subject matter too badly, he is able to describe the advanced work that he undertook at MIT making an economical liquid metal battery. He doesn't mention it, but Bill Gates is a financial backer of his startup that came out of his research, Liquid Metal Battery Corporation. In brief, he is attempting to make a battery that is technically advanced enough for the Smart Grid, but cheap enough to be used without government subsidies.

The most interesting thing I took away from this was his quote, where he states that it is important to have "passion for science in the service of society, not science in service of career building."

Attending Next Week's MIT Sloan Clean Energy Ventures Program

I'm excited about taking the MIT/Sloan Clean Energy Ventures: Creating Innovative New Businesses Through Entrepreneurial Management program next week as part of their executive education offerings. So far there are 21 people taking part, including many international executives (Mexico, Denmark, Singapore, ...)

The instructors include Bill Aulet (Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and also a Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management), Daniel Nocera (currently at Harvard University, and the ex-Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy and ex-Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT]. Prof. Nocera was also Director of MIT’s Solar Revolutions Project and the ENI Solar Frontiers Center), Ernest Moniz (currently MIT's Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics Emeritus and Special Advisor to the MIT President, previously the thirteenth United States Secretary of Energy from 2013 to January 2017), and others.

In addition to the classroom learning, we will be evaluating clean energy business opportunities at the 2012 MIT Clean Energy Prize. Following the evaluations, there is a VIP reception with the teams and judges. Looking forward to meeting the scientists and management leaders setting the standards in the clean energy field.

I intend to Tweet as time permits during these sessions, so feel free to follow @KeithDPatch. Blog recaps to follow in the coming weeks.