Growing interest in electric vehicles from the public, government and industry is creating a demand for scientific and technical advances in energy storage options. Experts in the field of electrochemical energy storage will bring their brainpower together at Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oct. 7-8 for a symposium called "Scalable Energy Storage Beyond Li-Ion: Materials Perspectives". A consortium of IBM Research and four DOE national labs (Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge, and Pacific Northwest) will hold talks, poster sessions and discussions to explore research opportunities in electrochemical energy storage. The ORNL conference, the third in a Beyond Lithium Ion series, will emphasize how materials science can accelerate progress in scalable energy storage. In 2009 IBM's Almaden Institute symposium was the first to address scalable energy storage, followed by Argonne National Lab's May 2010 symposium covering computational perspectives.
