Sandia Participates in the ARPA-E 2012 Energy Innovation Summit

The Sandia booth at the ARPA-E summit provides materials on our many energy-innovation projects—conducted in partnership with industry—to improve energy generation, transmission, storage, and distribution.

Sandia has more than a dozen scientists and managers attending and participating in the ARPA-E summit‘s sessions and events. A recent highlight was the on-stage discussion between Energy Secretary Stephen Chu and Bill Gates, who is now involved in several energy innovation ventures, on how America can meet and prosper from 21st century global energy challenges.

During their 45-minute conversation, they touched on many energy innovation topics (e.g., grid-scale energy storage, integrating renewable energy generation into the grid, 4th generation nuclear designs, solar thermal storage, solar-to-chemical-energy conversion, and how analysis tools such as high-performance computing simulation can support innovation in these areas) that have a home at Sandia, both under the auspices of ARPA-E and through other DOE sponsorship.

Their talk also covered system-scale issues like diversity in generation portfolio, managing long-distance transmission and local generation and storage, and incorporating energy efficiency and combined heat and power—also areas where Sandia excels and contributes to the national research portfolio.