We will overview decision-making in battery energy storage systems (BESS) across innovation, investment, and deployment. In this work, we apply three analytical lenses to BESS technology: learning curves, deployment costs, and economic feasibility. (1) Technology roadmap modeling — illustrated through a 6,000-scenario evaluation of sodium-ion versus lithium-ion batteries — captures both process and engineering learnings. (2) Site-level deployment costs are parameterized across civil, electrical, and installation factors, with energy density dominating system-level competitiveness. (3) Finally, a novel cumulative present value (CPV) tool assesses bankability by modeling revenue recovery against capital costs under realistic operating conditions, enabling comparison across multiple chemistries.

Bio

Will Chueh is a Kimmelman Professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering and Energy Science & Engineering at Stanford University, Department of Photon Science at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and the Director & Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy. He leads a group of more than thirty researchers pursuing the following missions: (1) understand reactions and transport involving ions and electrons, and (2) decarbonize various energy transformation pathways. He received his BS in applied physics, and his MS and PhD in materials science from Caltech. Prior to joining Stanford in 2012, he was a Distinguished Truman Fellow at Sandia National Laboratories. Chueh has received numerous honors, including the David A. Shirley Award (2023), Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award (2022), MRS Outstanding Young Investigator Award (2018), Volkswagen/BASF Science Award Electrochemistry (2016), Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2016), Sloan Research Fellowship (2016), NSF CAREER Award (2015), Solid State Ionics Young Scientist Award (2013), and Caltech Demetriades-Tsafka-Kokkalis Prize in Energy (2012). In 2012, he was named as one of the “Top 35 Innovators Under the Age of 35” by MIT’s Technology Review. He serves on the editorial boards of numerous journals including Energy & Environmental Science, and is the Editor-in-Chief of Solid State Ionics.