Held in early March, the 2026 Energy Storage Symposium convened researchers and professionals to connect emerging and maturing energy storage technologies with today’s electricity needs and use cases. Researchers funded by the energy storage program played a key role in organizing and contributing to the event.
Energy storage offers an additional, versatile tool to help stabilize, optimize, and grow the national electrical grid and its capacity. At the Symposium, researchers Will McNamara and Xiaolin Li of Sandia National Laboratories and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory chaired two and half days of presentations and posters to share the latest energy storage technology research. In particular, the event provided perspectives from the cutting edge of grid-scale battery development, non-battery storage, storage integration, safety and reliability, wholesale and retail market enablers, financing, and manufacturing and supply chain efficiencies.
This year, in honor of decades of vision and dedication to realizing grid-scale energy storage, the event commemorated the late Dr. Imre Gyuk, who served as Director, then Chief Scientist, of Energy Storage Research at the U.S. Department of Energy – Office of Electricity until his passing in 2025. Beginning in the late 1990s, Dr. Gyuk led a portfolio of storage technology research and development for the Department of Energy across a broad spectrum of applications. While under Dr. Gyuk’s direction, the program established a large, rigorous body of work foundational for the then-nascent US grid energy storage industry. Collaborating across industry, universities, and other government institutions, the program advanced energy storage technologies and systems to increase the reliability, performance, and competitiveness of electricity generation and transmission in the electric grid and standalone systems. Multiple technologies and developments from the program received R&D 100 awards for their technological significance.
Today, high-impact energy storage research and development continues within the program, overseen by the Office of Electricity.
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Electricity (OE), Energy Storage Division.