Energy storage is considered the holy grail that would unlock a vast increase in solar and wind renewable electricity generation.

That’s the topic for the latest episode of Grid Talk featuring Will McNamara who is a Grid Energy Policy Storage Analyst with Sandia National Laboratories.

Six national energy labs and a cohort of 200 partners across the energy industry have joined together in a moonshot effort to vastly expand energy storage in America. It is all being coordinated through the National Consortium for the Advancement of Long Duration Energy Storage (LDES) technologies.

“There was a proposal call issued by the Department of Energy offering funds to the national labs to create an industry forum focused on the many challenges that are facing long-duration energy storage technologies and create this forum so that the industry can come together and address these challenges,” said McNamara

The goal is to boost storage technology on a large scale from about four hours duration to 10 hours.

“The sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow so we need to find a way to store the energy to make it dispatchable, hence the need for energy storage, so we are absolutely in this evolutionary period. We are building the constructs for the future.”

In his role as Grid Energy Storage Policy Analyst for Sandia National Laboratories, McNamara focuses on energy storage policy development at the federal and state levels. He has spent his entire 23-year career in the energy and utilities industry with a concentration on regulatory and legislative policy. Additional areas of subject matter expertise include distributed energy resources, AMI/smart grid, renewables, and competitive retail markets.

McNamara has an M.B.A. from University of Phoenix, an M.A. in Mass Communications from the University of Iowa, and a B.A. in Political Science and Journalism from the University of Iowa.