Nanoscale science for terawatt/gigaton scale performance of clean energy technologies

To meet greenhouse gas reduction targets and growing energy needs, massive increases in deployment of key technologies—photovoltaics, wind, electrolyzers, and energy storage— are anticipated over the next two to three decades. The unprecedented scale of this deployment presents challenges ranging from rapid product development cycles and lagging standards to the demand for the highest levels of system performance and reliability. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) sponsored an initial workshop to bring together over 50 experts in the various renewable energy technologies to examine commonalities across technologies, identify areas for synergistic work, and outline a pathway for degradation science to enable a long-lasting clean energy economy. This ambitious pathway seeks to connect reliability data at scale, develop cross-cutting methods, and ultimately enable translation to industry standards.