INTRODUCING THE KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Keynote speaker one at BCI in September is Mark Mills, senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute and co-founder of the Montrose Lane energy-tech venture fund. His presentation, ‘Mines, Minerals and “Green” Energy: A Reality Check’, will be given on the opening day of the convention. Mills began his career as an experimental physicist on the back of his BSc in physics from Queen’s University, Canada. He went on to earn several patents at Bell Northern Research in Canada, and at the RCA David Sarnoff Research Center.

As well as writing for publications including Wall Street Journal, Forbes, USA Today and TechCrunch, Mills has a number of books to his name, including one that was praised by Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates.

The Bottomless Well, co-authored in 2005 with Peter Huber, was ‘the only book I’ve ever seen that really explains energy’, Gates said. In it, Mills and Huber talk about how demand for energy will never drop, and how much of what is widely presumed about energy is in fact myth.

The book describes the power grid as ‘the worst system we could have except for the proposed alternatives’, and predicts that in the automotive sector, gas prices will matter less and less as hybrid engines lead to cars propelled by the grid.

“Expanding energy supplies mean higher productivity, more jobs, and a growing GDP,” says the Manhattan Institute, where Mills is a senior fellow, and which reviewed the book. “Across the board, energy isn’t the problem, energy is the solution.”

Other books by Mills include Digital Cathedrals: The Information Infrastructure Era in January 2020; Work in the Age of Robots in 2018; and about to come out, The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and a Roaring 2020s.

Mills holds a number of senior positions, including president of Digital Power Technologies, which he cofounded 20 years ago. In 2007 he chaired and took the company’s subsidiary, ICx Technologies, public in an IPO. Before that he had worked in the White House Science Office under former US president Ronald Reagan. He has worked in fibre optics, solid-state devices and defence.

The second keynote presentation will come from Imre Gyuk, director for energy storage research with the US Department of Energy. His presentation is ‘Energy Storage for the Future Grid’ and will be delivered on the second day of the convention. Gyuk has worked for the DoE for 32 years, and for the past two decades has directed its energy storage programme, which funds work on a range of storage technologies for different applications, including advanced batteries, flywheels, supercapacitors and compressed air energy storage.

He has supervised the $185 million stimulus funding for grid-scale energy storage demonstrations and is partnering states on projects for grid resilience.

Gyuk’s research has looked at materials, devices and systems, as well as funding work on analytics, policy, finance and social equity. One such programme was called ‘Long Duration Storage and Storage for Social Equity’.

To date his work has led to 12 awards for R&D, two EPA Green Chemistry Challenge Awards and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the US Energy Storage Association and NAATBatt.

His first degree, a bachelor of science, was gained at Fordham University. He then worked on superconductivity at Brown University as a research assistant to Nobel Laureate Leon Cooper, who developed the BCS theory of superconductivity and co-developed the BCM theory of synaptic plasticity.

Gyuk’s PhD was in theoretical particle physics from Purdue University in Indiana, after which he became a research associate at Syracuse, then taught physics, civil engineering and environmental architecture at the University of Wisconsin.

Gyuk then became associate professor in the Department of Physics at Kuwait University, and he remained in the Gulf for six years, organizing an international workshop on the environment of the Arab Gulf and becoming a member of the Emir’s Taskforce on Technology and the Future of Kuwait.

That was when he moved back to the US to join the DoE to manage the Thermal and Physical Storage programme.

Gyuk’s research interests include the theory of elementary particles, metallurgy of non-stoichiometric alloys, non-linear groundwater flow and architectural design using renewable energy and passive solar techniques.