As the cost of renewable electricity continues to fall, we are rapidly entering a new era that will be defined by the widespread availability of low cost, intermittent renewable electricity. This rapidly unfolding megatrend is suddenly making clear the opportunity to develop a new set of industrial electrochemistry paradigms to enable cost-effective deep decarbonization of the global economy.

Two exemplar paradigms of this broader opportunity include: 1.) ultra-low-cost, ultra-long-duration (days to seasonal) energy storage to cost-effectively enable extremely high penetrations of intermittent renewables onto the world’s grids and 2.) extremely low capital cost “renewable electricity-to-X” (RE2X) commodity electrosynthesis platforms that could unleash the “electrification of everything”, enabling a rapidly decarbonizing electric power sector to cost-effectively decarbonize the world’s largest commodity production markets, widely believed to be the hardest sectors to decarbonize, for the first time (e.g. steel, hydrogen, ammonia, and others). In this talk, Dr. Danielson will provide a broad overview of his work at Breakthrough Energy Ventures and, more specifically, he will discuss promising new paradigms in industrial electrochemistry that he believes have tremendous potential to enable “the electrification of everything” in the unfolding era of low cost renewable energy.