April 05, 2010

New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium Elects 15 Board Members

Statewide Leadership from Industry, Academia, and Business to Support Energy R&D and Manufacturing

Albany, April 5, 2010 — Francis J. Murray, Jr., president and CEO of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) today announced the election of 15 industry, academic and business energy storage leaders to the Board of New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology (NY-BEST) consortium.  The board reflects the embedded strength of its members, the top researchers and industry leaders engaged in energy storage and battery manufacture in the Empire State. 

“This prestigious group of New Yorkers are nationally-recognized experts who are well-prepared to advance the Empire State’s Energy Storage industry,” Murray said.  “Governor David Paterson noted that creating advanced energy storage is essential for us to achieve substantial reductions in our greenhouse gas emissions, and he proposed this consortium in 2009 to position New York as a national leader in this important field.  Clearly, this pool of talent will help us achieve that goal.”

Elected to the Board of Directors members include:

Elected for a one-year term:
Sanjoy Banerjee – Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and Director of the Energy Institute, City University of New York.  He has developed the Electrochemical Energy Storage Lab at CUNY, and aggregated expertise in the CUNY Colleges related to electrochemistry and electrochemical engineering, as well as electrode and electrolyte materials. There are now about 20 faculty affiliates in developments ranging from metacapacitors, through flow batteries based on metal anodes, to lithium technology batteries. Several patent disclosures have been made and the Energy Institute is working closely with New York-based industry to take these lab developments through commercial development. His specialty R&D interests include dendrite formation and control in metal anode batteries, e.g. zinc and aluminum anodes for metal-gas cathode systems, and he leads a CUNY collaboration with University of Buffalo.  Dr. Banerjee was recruited to CUNY from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Julius Cirin – Vice President, Corporate Communications Officer, Ultralife Corporation, Newark (Wayne County) has more than 33 years of battery experience, and serves as VP and Corporate Communications Officer at Ultralife Corp., which offers products ranging from portable and standby power solutions to communications and electronics systems. He has been with Ultralife since its founding in 1991 serving as VP of Corporate Marketing and Technology and Director of Marketing. Prior to that, he was Quality Assurance Manager for Kodak’s Ultra Technologies Battery Division and worked at Duracell USA in several product and process engineering, and quality management roles. He also worked at Power Conversion Inc., helping with the launch of some of the first lithium batteries ever used for military and commercial applications.

Richard Fioravanti – Director, Storage Applications & Support, KEMA, Inc. Albany. Through KEMA labs, R&D activity, advanced modeling, and experience demonstrating energy storage systems, he has supported efforts including testing of MW Lithium-ion device at Indianapolis Power & Light, auditing of the AES 12MW plant in Chile, testing of a MW-scale battery for a wind farm in Hawaii, and even testing of a new, zinc-metal air battery. Also, KEMA has modeled emission benefits of the Beacon Power flywheel for frequency regulation and used its “KERMIT” model to assist the CAISO and CA Energy Commission to assess the impact of the State’s 2020 and 2030 Renewable Portfolio Standard, whether energy storage could mitigate the impacts, and how much storage would be required to accomplish the goal.

Cathy Hill – Counsel, Whiteman, Osterman & Hanna, Albany, founded that law firm’s CleanTech practice where during the past three years, they have sited more than 800MW of wind energy and have represented developers and innovators in the solar, energy storage, geothermal, energy efficiency, smart grid and lighting industries. As former Vice President of Corporate Development for MTI Microfuel Cells, she worked with the energy storage industry and markets. She has also entered into strategic transactions with energy storage companies including Duracell and Beacon Power.

Robert Jaworski – Chief Strategy Officer, Ioxus, Inc. Oneonta, has more than 18 years in energy storage industry experience, ranging over multiple energy storage technologies, all company life-cycle stages, and work across four continents. His experience includes basic research of energy storage technologies at three academic institutions, development of battery and ultracapacitor products at industrial research labs, business and technology consulting, and investment banking for companies in the industry. He has been doing business with organizations ranging from very early stage ventures to multinational corporations.  Ioxus engineers and manufacturers high-energy ultrapacitors entirely in the U.S. providing low resistance, making them ideal for delivering high power bursts for acceleration, energy recapture, peak load shaving, and high power applications.

Wolf von Maltzahn – Associate VP for Research, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy is associated with two NYSTAR-funded Centers for Advanced Technologies focused on Automation Technologies and Systems and Future Energy Systems. Both centers have close relationships with New York-based companies engaged in energy generation, energy distribution, and energy storage. He has been in the forefront of energy-related research projects such as the recent RPI invention of the paper battery and the start-up company that followed. Other examples include work on cellulosic materials for ultra-capacitors, developing nano-structured silicon anodes for lithium-ion batteries, building a battery test lab, and studying ionic transport phenomena in electro-chemical devices. Such projects have lead to active interactions with companies like Ioxus, Ultralife, Oak-Mitsui, GE, and Energenics.

Hank McGlynn – President, AEYCH LLC, Endicott, retired from BAE Systems in 2008 as Vice President
and General Manager of a $500 million business unit.  In 1990, he helped launch a new business initiative to develop drive systems for hybrid-electric vehicles. Demonstrations were conducted for many types of vehicles, the most successful application being the hybrid electric transit bus. Today, over 2500 buses are in service. Energy storage is a key element of a hybrid vehicle and his work has improved concept designs to a rugged, reliable storage system in daily revenue service. AEYCH was founded in 2008 to provide management and technical consulting services to those enterprises engaged in research, development, production, or operation of rugged, reliable, integrated power electronic systems used in heavy-duty hybrid electric vehicles or grid-connected energy storage systems.

Elected for a two-year term:
Aubrey Braz – Vice President, Consolidated Edison Company of New York where Con Edison uses batteries in a number of mission-critical applications such as providing back-up power at substations. As Vice President overseeing operations, he has been closely involved in the installation, evaluation and maintenance of these important pieces of its electric system. In addition, Con Edison has a number of on-going research efforts related to the advancement of batteries and other energy storage technologies. He has worked closely with in-house R&D teams to identify and prioritize corporate expenditures on this technology.

Michael Field – President, Operations and Engineering Division, The Raymond Corporation, Greene, Chenango County.  Founded in 1949, Raymond is the North American market leader in producing electric forklifts for the warehouse and distribution markets. Raymond forklifts use primarily AC inverter driven motor and controls technology, which include regeneration. Thousands of units per year are produced at the Greene plant and all those units require energy storage.  The most common storage device is a lead acid battery, though Raymond produces units designed to be powered by fuel cells and continues to invest in R&D in lithium ion battery applicability. Investigating the use of super capacitors to optimize on board energy management systems integrated in forklifts is underway.

Matt Fronk – Director, Center for Sustainable Mobility, Rochester Institute of Technology has over 20 years of experience in leading the GM Fuel Cell Research and Development program at Honeoye Falls, Ontario County. During his tenure, the development of electrochemical devices has gone from 50cm2 cells to 100 vehicles--the largest of any OEM auto company. This up-scaling involved advancement from Research into Product development and then into the execution phase for a large fleet build up. Also, he has extensive global supplier community experience.  At RIT, he is instrumental in enhancing the life- cycle analyses that go into new product design so that waste and energy use is minimized in the production process.  

Rich Hopf – General Manager Transport Systems, BAE Systems, Inc., Johnson City has led the hybrid propulsion business at BAE Systems since 2003. During this time BAE’s installed base of transit bus propulsion systems has grown from a pilot fleet of 18 systems in the United States to over 2,700 systems in operation in North America and Western Europe. The packaging and management of energy storage systems has been a key aspect of BAE’s success in this market. His corporate experience with a variety of storage technologies including lead acid batteries, ultra-capacitors, and lithium-ion batteries has been significant. He also helped develop expertise in the management of fuel cell applications to vehicles.

Glen Merfeld – Manager, Chemical Energy Systems Laboratory, GE Global Research, Niskayuna (Schenectady County) manages the Chemical Energy Systems Laboratory at GE Global Research where his group works on chemistry-based energy storage. His team has played a foundational role in advancing the sodium metal halide battery technology that is now the basis for GE’s new battery business, GEMx Technologies LLC, which plans to build a 900MWh-battery manufacturing facility in Schenectady with applications ranging from industrial transportation to grid utility and renewables. He played a central role in shaping the battery business opportunity for GE through market assessments and technology evaluations. He has represented GE externally with invited talks on energy storage at conferences, universities, government agencies, and national laboratories across the U.S. and with customers around the globe.

Jim Misewich – Associate Laboratory Director, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island.  BNL has made energy storage one of its focal areas in fulfilling its mission as a US DOE Laboratory. BNL operates a significant materials science effort and has a history of contributions in lithium-ion battery science, particularly in the use of advanced techniques for in-situ study of battery materials. They have developed tools and techniques for battery characterization at its user facilities including the National Synchrotron Light Source and the Center for Functional Nanomaterials and have made these tools available to academic and industrial users.

Paul Mutolo – Director of External Partnerships, Energy Materials Center, Cornell University, Ithaca has worked in the alternative electrical energy sector for 10 years, concentrating in micro fuel cells for portable power and battery storage. He has also worked for the start-up company, MTI MicroFuel Cells (MFC), Albany where he helped develop its Mobion technology, the fuel cell core that MTI MFC is now commercializing. At MTI MFC, he worked with vendors and materials suppliers, and also acted as an in-house vendor, delivering the fuel cell core to system engineers for integration into products. Batteries and other energy storage are closely related fields to those in which he worked at MTI, and he has acted as an industry liaison during his five years at Cornell.

M. Stanley Whittingham – Director, Institute for Materials Research and Professor of Chemistry, Binghamton University has been involved in battery technology for 40 years, first working on the solid electrolyte beta alumina at Stanford (received Young Author Award of ECS). Later, he worked on lithium batteries at Exxon, from fundamental research through commercialization of the world’s first rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. He holds 15 US Patents related to batteries. Since 1988 he has concentrated on R&D on advanced materials for the electrodes of lithium batteries. With more than 200 publications, and having co-chaired the DOE study in 2007 of chemical energy storage and helped publicize the recommendations through presentations and a widely publicized article in the Materials Research Society Bulletin, he received the Battery Research Award and Fellowship in the Electrochemical Society.

Permanent Directors:
Frank Murray – President and CEO, NYSERDA has worked in private and government sector energy policy roles for more than 30 years.  He served as policy advisor to the US Secretary of Energy, assisting in the development of the Clinton Administration’s national energy policy. Prior to that, he served as the State Commissioner of Energy and Chairman of the NYSERDA Board of Directors and also served as Chairman of the State Energy Planning Board, a multi-agency statutory board charged with the responsibility of developing a comprehensive, integrated energy plan for the State that integrated State energy, environmental and economic development policies.

Earlier, he served as Deputy Secretary to the Governor for Energy and the Environment, and as Assistant Secretary for Energy and the Environment in the administration of Governor Mario M. Cuomo.  He represented New York in numerous national and regional energy and environmental activities, including the Coalition of Northeastern Governors, the National Governors’ Association, and the Council of Great Lakes Governors.  He began his work on New York State energy issues as legislative counsel and then as an energy and environmental policy advisor to Governor Hugh Carey from 1977 to 1982. 

Ed Reinfurt – was appointed Executive Director, NYSTAR (New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation), Albany, by Gov. Eliot Spitzer and now serves as a member of the Economic Development Subcabinet of Governor David Paterson. He also serves as a member of the New York State Broadband and Deployment Council.
Governor Paterson named him to the New York State Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Cabinet, created to manage the development of State and local infrastructure projects financed through the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Currently, NYSTAR is involved in the administration of Governor Paterson's New Innovation Economy Matching Grants Program. Under this program New York is committing up to a 10% match in State funds for each ARRA awardee in strategic areas of innovation.
Prior to NYSTAR, he served as Vice President of the Business Council of New York State, Inc. The Business Council represented more than 3,000 member businesses, chambers of commerce and professional and trade associations.
The next NY-BEST board meeting is set for early April and the primary agenda items will be electing board officers and discussing near-term consortium priorities.  The consortium is operating through the aegis of NYSERDA and relying on staff contributions of the respective member organizations.  An appropriation of NYSERDA funding of approximately $25 million through Clean Air Interstate Rule proceeds is being used to establish NY-BEST activities.