long-duration-energy-storage
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Edward Shaffer
Dr. Edward O. Shaffer II is the CEO and founder of Advanced Battery Concepts, a Clare, Michigan company he started in 2009 to reinvent the 160-year-old lead-acid battery instead of chasing lithium. His patented GreenSeal bipolar architecture strips cost, lead and weight out of large-format storage while keeping the batteries fully recyclable, and it has been licensed to battery makers around the world including Crown, Clarios, EnerSys, Exide, Trojan and Monbat. An MIT-trained materials scientist and former Dow Chemical R&D manager, Shaffer argues that energy storage only scales when it is economically, socially and environmentally responsible - all three at once.
Thomas Sisto
Thomas Sisto is the CEO and co-founder of XL Batteries, a Marlborough, Massachusetts startup commercializing water-based organic flow batteries for long-duration, grid-scale energy storage. A synthetic organic chemist by training, Sisto discovered the company's core molecule during a Columbia University postdoc - a compound he originally designed for solar cells that turned out to be extraordinarily stable in pH-neutral saltwater. He spun XL out of Columbia in 2019 and has since steered it from a lab curiosity to its first commercial pilot, betting that cheap, abundant organic chemicals can break China's grip on the battery supply chain.
Eugene Beh
Eugene Beh is the founder and CEO of Quino Energy, a clean-tech startup commercializing water-based redox flow batteries that store grid-scale renewable energy using quinones - organic molecules dissolved in water. A chemist trained at Harvard and Stanford, he spun the technology out of Harvard's Aziz and Gordon labs and built a single-step, zero-waste manufacturing process that turns coal-tar feedstock into non-flammable battery electrolyte. Before Quino, he was Xerox PARC's most prolific inventor two years running.
Mateo Jaramillo
Mateo Jaramillo is the co-founder and CEO of Form Energy, a Somerville, Massachusetts company building 100-hour iron-air batteries that store electricity by rusting and un-rusting iron. After more than seven years at Tesla, where he started and ran the stationary storage business behind the Powerwall and Powerpack, he co-founded Form in 2017 on a contrarian bet: skip lithium, find a chemistry cheap enough to store power for days instead of hours. The company has raised over $1.3 billion, revived an abandoned West Virginia steel mill as its first factory, and signed a roughly $1 billion deal with Google for the world's largest battery system.