Dr. Imre Gyuk is Director of Energy Storage Research at the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Electricity. Twenty years ago, when he took charge of the stationary energy storage program, the technology was only beginning to be explored. There were very few demonstrations and the rare industry meetings were only attended by a handful of researchers, scientists, and dreamers. Under Dr. Gyuk’s leadership the DOE program grew into a $100M a year effort while storage technology became one of the hottest topics of the electricity business. His Program includes research on materials, devices, and systems; it also funds work on power electronics, analytics, policy, and finance. He sponsored groundbreaking work on vanadium redox and other flow batteries as well as on rechargeable zinc manganese batteries.
Collaborations with Sandia National Laboratories and Pacific Northwest National Laboratories have led to numerous pioneering storage installations. His group was the first to recognize the potential of energy storage for frequency regulation and demonstrate this in a full-fledged installation. FERC's resulting “pay for performance” mandate provided the first viable business case of Energy Storage for utility applications. His group also funded pioneering projects using storage for upgrade deferral of substations and combining storage and photo voltaic generation for cost effective resiliency applications. For the past 2 decades, he has directed work on a wide portfolio of storage technologies for a broad spectrum of applications, partnering with states, tribes, and municipalities on numerous projects for grid scale demonstrations. Most recently he is involved with long duration storage and energy justice.
Having received a B.S. from Fordham University, Dr. Gyuk did graduate work at Brown University on Superconductivity and received a Ph.D. in Theoretical Particle Physics from Purdue University. He taught Physics, Civil Engineering, and Environmental Architecture at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Gyuk became an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at Kuwait University where he became interested in issues of sustainability. He served on the Emir’s taskforce on the Future of Kuwait and organized a conference on the Environment of the Gulf. He has traveled widely throughout the Near East, Europe, China, and Japan.
His work has led to 13 R&D 100 awards, two EPA Green Chemistry Challenge Award, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from ESA and NAATBatt. He has also received the Tibbetts Award from the U.S. Small Business Administration for technology transfer, He is internationally recognized as a leader in the energy storage field.