"The challenge is finding bigger and more efficient
energy storage systems"

Tell us something about your childhood and how you started throwing into the world of science.

Well, it's a long story. Well, fist of all, my father is Hungarian and that's where my name comes from. But I was born in Berlin, and then I grew up in Salzburg, in Austria. And my high school studies were in Austria. And I acquired the knowledge that the civilized European should have, Latin, geography, history... the whole matrix of civilized knowledge. And above all, Salzburg of course is a wonderful city that's you know, 1200 years old, and living right in the centre, the influence of buildings of every epoch is something that becomes part of one because, the castles, the churches... you know, that was very much my interest.

Now, originally I was not really terribly interested in technology. My interest was basically in nature: plants, animals, stones, anything connected with nature. And then when I was 15 my parents decided that it was time to go somewhere else and they came to New York. And, so, here I was, 15 years old, and after Salzburg the city of New York provided a wonderful contrast because, it's very intense, very modern... but of course I also lived very close to the Metropolitan museum so the culture continued. And I went to Fordham University at the age of 15 and they asked me "well, what would you like to study?" and I said well, biology, chemistry, physics... and they said "take physics, I think it's a good choice". So I studied physics at Fordham University, enjoying it greatly, but at the same time I also took Spanish and so for the next four years I took Spanish at university. In particular, I took courses in Spanish literature. I had the whole breadth of Spanish, starting with La Edad Media, El Arcipreste de Hita, Fray Luis de León, Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, and above all Cervantes. Cervantes me interesó mucho. And also the interpretation by Unamuno. El Cervantes de Unamuno, para mí es muy importante. In fact, I was given the Cervantes medal of the Hispanic Society in New York. It's the same society that put on the Sorolla exhibit here, in Bilbao, last fall. So I graduated and then I went on to Brown University. Ivy League College, lovely campus. I continued my studies in physics and I started to concentrate on theoretical physics because I'm not really terribly good doing experiments and so on. For me the theoretical structure, the aesthetics of physics is the most important part. I was working for a while with the Nobel Prize winner Leon Cooper but then I changed to a Chinese physicist named (…) and he changed over to a different university. He went to Purdue in the mid-west. He took me along so eventually I got my Phd in Theoretical physics, the theory of elementary particles. That was a very exciting period because that was a time when all these wonderful symmetries of elementary particles became known and studied.

You have already gone through the first three questions I had.

Let me tell you how it continues, because I then went to Syracuse university as a post doctoral and then to the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Milwaukee is a very pleasant town on the shore of Lake Michigan and it was a very nice place to start a family. I had met my wife by the way at Brown University. She also graduated from Brown. And to continue with the international theme, my wife is Albanian.

Albanian? with "b"?

Albanesa, right.

So, finally having arrived in Milwaukee it was time to start a family and I have two sons and one daughter. My interest slowly changed. First of all, I changed into the theory of metals, alloy metals of different types. It's actually very similar to the kind of thing that Anton Van der Ven was talking about. So I did theory of alloys and then I became interested in groundwater flow, because in groundwater flow you can do very interesting theoretical studies. And the groundwater flow led me to water resources in general, you know, the availability of water, the importance of water in the human existence. And that led me to more environmental interest. Then I joined the faculty of architecture and I taught architecture for five years, with my own studio. Architecture students are wonderful because they are a little scientific but they also have lots of interesting ideas. And that was the psychodelic period. That was the time when the hippy movement was, ecology became first important and these were very exciting times and I became a kind of guru to the students because they found the idea of physics very appealing. I was in the school of architecture. You know, from every phase of your life, you have to learn something that you keep for afterwards. In the theoretical physics it was the aesthetics. In the engineering phase I learnt the interaction with the human condition, that you don't just do theoretical structures of mind, but you have science in the service of humanity. Architecture finally really brought it down to the human ecological dimension but it also taught me to present, because for architects the presentation is very important. You have to talk about what you're going to build, you have to convince people. So, that's where I started becoming very familiar with the process of presentation.

And then I decided "it's time to do something different". Every six years or so I like to change things. I've always had an interest in the Islamic world. The possibility presented itself for a university appointment at the University of Kuwait. I went to Kuwait, back to physics. I stayed in Kuwait with my whole family for six years. And during the year it was a wonderful opportunity to visit the rest of the Islamic world. I was teaching physics, of course. But as part of my hobby, I was teaching fencing at the university. And they would send as for spring training to Morocco, for example. So the possibility to see Morocco, not as an American certainly, not as an European, but in fact as somebody from inside, from another Islamic country is very unique because I could go there and I would not immediately be singled out as a foreigner. Or sailing on the Nile, in Egypt, and going to a conference on the history of the Islamic science in Damascus, actually it was in Aleppo. And Iran, northern India, the whole again the architectural framework of the Islamic world is very exciting. But ...

I think it's important to ask you a question now relating, inevitably, energy, perhaps. About this background. When you started getting interested or started to interpret it, or somehow link to energy.

Ok, in Kuwait it was physics but it was also the environment. I wrote papers on, I'm trying to think, the cultural collapse in Koranic thought. Also, there are many civilizations that developed and then had a very rapid fall. Almost always this was due to a problem with energy and water. If you have strong climatic changes, the culture, the civilization doesn't just go down, it goes completely down. And that of course is danger with our civilization too. The more strongly that a civilization is developed, the more strongly it falls down. Anyway, six years was enough in Kuwait and I took an appointment with the department of energy.

How many years ago was that?

So long time ago, I'd have to go and calculate. But at the department of energy, my first field was thermal energy storage; that is to say, the heat and the cold that you can capture in one time and bring it to another time. And the thermal storage went on for a number of years and then Congress decided that they weren't terribly interested in it and so they cut the funding.

But the CIC energiGUNE is very interested in it. Anyway, this is something else.

The thing is that everything goes through phases. And, they cut it off and then they had to invent it again. So after the thermal energy I took up the storage of electrical energy and that has been my field of interest for the last maybe 12 years.

And this is one of the reasons why you are at the scientific committee of electrochemistry in CIC energiGUNE and we are very much interested in that particular area, perhaps is the main area of interest at this particular moment at CIC, so, go ahead with electrical energy storage.

About ten years ago, when I started in this field, there was very little interest. The electrical utilities did not, really... They were not interested in energy storage. They thought they had enough energy, no problem. But to a considerable degree because of my group, which includes national laboratory, Sandia laboratory, slowly and slowly utilities and other organizations became interested in storage. This was very slow, because we had to convince them. I never had very much money in my group, so I had worked together with the state of California, with the state of New York, with important utilities that were forward looking. There was not a single demonstration of energy storage ten years ago, now there are dozens, and almost all of them are due to the efforts of our group.

So do you think that these developments in electrical storage are going to be important for the development of renewables or what do you think about this linkage that is very much said about renewables...

We are very much concerned about energy; our whole civilization is built on the availability of energy and particularly electrical energy. The trouble is energy is not static. There is demand and there is generation. And the demand is the load, goes with the human activity, so there is a maximum during the daytime and a minimum at night, but machines don't like to work that way. Machines like to have a constant output of energy. So, we always have either to much or too little energy. If it's a hot day and there's lots of air conditioning in the Unites States. Then the supply of energy comes very close to the maximum, and you can go over that, and then you have a blackout. In the Unites States we have some spectacular blackouts. And then people started to realize that in fact the electricity net has no buffer. The load and the generation have to be matched moment by moment and this is no good because a system like that can collapse.

And this becomes worse when you have renewable energy. Now, we need renewable energy because we are concerned with global warming, and environmental situation. But when you have renewable energy you can not really predict when that energy is going to happen, so you have to have a buffer, something that can absorb energy when there is too much available and give it back to the net when it's required. And that's what storage can do.

And talking about technologies of storage. Which are the ones you think are most promising at the moment...

We have an entire spectrum of technologies. We have really big ones, like pump hydro, water in a dam that is pumped up and comes down again, then we are talking about hundreds of megawatts. Then we have compressed air. Compressed air is being stored underground and that's how we can store the energy. Compressed air will also be hundreds of megawatts but the problem is we have only two plants in the world. If my efforts are successful, we will probably have at least three more in the next five years. And that I think will be a model for very large wind farms to absorb this variable capacity of the wind. Then, on a smaller scale, you have batteries. Batteries of course, are almost everywhere. In personal computing, personal electronic, the batteries are very small. Then we are talking about electric vehicles, the batteries get bigger. What we need for the electricity grid is of course much bigger batteries. It starts with megawatts. The biggest battery complexes that exist at the moment are in Japan. We have them as high as 34 megawatts. That one in particular is associated with the wind farm. They put all the energy at night into the battery and during the daytime they have a completely predictable amount of energy that is given back to the electricity net. And that's the kind of thing we are trying to achieve with research on battery, because I have two problems: one problem is to convince the utilities to accept batteries, batteries as energy storage devices, as part of the grid. The other problem is to produce bigger and better storage devices, which mostly translates into bigger and better batteries. We have a number of types of batteries: the classical battery, the one used in cars nowadays, is the lead acid battery. The lead acid battery has a new version, called the lead carbon battery. Then there is lithium. Lithium iron batteries are the ones used in most electronic devices. We would like to make those bigger, and more efficient and above all cheaper, because they are not cheap at the moment. So we have to look at the expense. So we need them better and cheaper. Another area is flow batteries. Flow batteries are very interesting. You basically have two liquids, when they meet they produce electricity. Then you can run them backwards and the energy goes back into the liquids and stores it.

Something about energy policy. Energy policy in the world has gone with ups and downs, it cause some reactions, particularly when there is a crisis, we're talking about the 70s, we can talk about 80s, but the energy problems has always been forgotten for everyone. All has always come down to a prize that, all the things were just left out. So we've had this kind of crying wolf coming up and we have now a new wolf coming up. The point is, is this the real wolf? Or is this just another call, alarm that is not going to get sustained.

Actually all the wolves were real. Only sometimes they were chased away. But it's always been a real wolf. The reason why it did not develop into a global crisis is simply because people pumped more oil or made more energy available. But the point is the oil is limited so you can do this only so many times. Nowadays we've come to such a point that we have limits not only on the oil, but we have limits because of global warming. In the United States, the administration until very recently would hardly admit the reality and existence of global warming. In fact we had senators and congress men who would call it a communist conspiracy and delay. But of course, in scientific circles, and also in certain government agencies, we've always known that global warming is a serious limitation that we have to work on and that's why there is a development of renewable energy. Now we have the problem not only of availability energy, but as I mentioned the steady availability of energy, and that has brought energy storage to the forefront. Now we've had a change in administration, global warming is now accepted as a reality and in fact the administration is going to great lengths to create essentially a green energy industry. We are supporting renewable energy with funding and with policies and energy storage has become part of this policy. As you know, we are at the moment not only on energy crisis but in fact in an economic crisis. I won't say why, but we're all in the middle of that. One of the ways to deal with this economic crisis has been to pump lots of funding into areas such as renewable energy. And also some funding into energy storage. So, after years of having minimal funding, I suddenly find myself with 200 million dollars of demonstrations and projects, and this is a huge responsibility. I'm worrying to do this in a responsible way, because one does not just throw money out, you know, I feel personally responsible for making sure that we get projects that really help the electric grid and the people in general.

From that point of view, how long do you think we'll have to wait to get some true resource that it's going to start really changing our energy structure, from the point of view of storage, for example?

I think it's already happening. I think this thing will happen very fast. I know of twenty companies that are interested in having compressed air energy storage. One of them in fact is a Spanish company, I believe it's Iberdrola. They are going into the wind farm business in upper New York State. We have an agreement with the Energy Agency of New York State and we're planning for a compressed air development in that area.

Is this going to be an underground storage system?

That will be underground storage, a hundred mega watt, or something along that line. So, it's going to happen very fast and it's going to have an impact. The amount of wind in the United States, the percentage, is going up very fast and that, of course, creates its own problem because it creates instabilities. So now we have to not only develop wind, we have to develop the mechanisms of stability for deploying this wind. Spain, of course, is in a wonderful position, because Spain has something like, 25 % wind, you can check on the numbers...

The average, yearly basis is about 10-11 % of electricity energy, wind, although some days you can get up to 25 % in a single day, but as an average is about 10-11 %.

Then you can say, wind energy in Spain can be as high as 25 %, but there is also as much as 20 % available in pump hydro and so the energy balance is very good in Spain. And Europe of course has more storage, and also in Japan there's more storage. United States probably has the least amount of storage, so we need the most.

So from the point of view of future, and I'm talking about the near future, which is this present century, how do you think things are going to evolve from the actual state? How are things going to be in this field in year, say 2099?

That's further than I can see, because there will be many changes and they will interact and it's not clear how they'll do that. For example, I'm convinced that fairly soon we are going to see electric vehicles, electric cars, because running on oil is absurd. So we will have electric vehicles, but the electric vehicles of course, will have to draw on the grid also. They will use a lot of energy, we have to make sure that that energy is green, otherwise we have not gained anything. So there will be the electric vehicles, there will be further growth in the level of consumption; at the same time, the limitations are going to become more stringent, because people will realize that between pollution and global warming we just can't continue in a linear way along that direction. So there will a lot of interaction between different trends in society which make for uncertainty.

It looks like a revolution.

Well, if not a revolution, it is certainly a rapid evolution and we'll see changes and we will see them within the next decade. I'm particularly gratified also to see this happening, this interesting energy storage, not only in the United States, but in fact globally. I have worked with the australians, there is now a program on energy storage demonstration in Australia, and I am very gratified to revive my old interest in the spanish language and spanish culture, interact with the newly formed CIC energiGUNE, which is very exciting because you're going to have an institute there, devoted to the deeper development of batteries and electrical energy storage.

We have covered most, I think... Just talking about a bit related to CIC from the point of view of research and energy. What do you think is the areas that the world and also CIC is concentrating on?

I think I would prefer to leave that to the specialists, because I'm really a manager of the overall trends and developments. The actual chemistry should be up to the chemists. But I can see a number of developments. In particular, I believe we have to go beyond lithium. At the moment, lithium iron batteries and lithium batteries are the most advanced sort of batteries. I think we have to go beyond that. First of all, because I think lithium iron batteries have gone into maximum development in terms of expense and efficiency and we need bigger and cheaper batteries. So beyond lithium is one of the things.

Other modes, I mentioned the lead carbon batteries, which turn out to live much longer than the lead acid batteries, are a promising development. There are quite a few groups that are working on flow batteries. The flow batteries were basically developed in Australia. We now see them with different metals, with different electrolytes. I expect in the near future to see a number of flow battery systems emerging. Compressed air, of course, it's a disgrace that we have this technology and it's been functioning very well in Germany and in the United States, but we haven't seen one built in 50 years, almost. So it's time to give this technology a better chance. I see development over all fronts, but particularly in electric chemistry there's a lot of interesting stuff to be done.

A question about American administration. Do you think it's going to be a steady... there has been a fantastic growth in money developed to research and development in energy fields, and particularly in the area of energy storage? Do you think it's going to be a continuing effort and this thing is not going to picture out as it happened with thermal storage many years ago?

No, I think the commitment to science and to energy technology is very serious. This administration has grown up as a scientifically literate administration, (which is more than we can say about the previous one. Don't quote me!) It's going to continue. Now, it will not continue on the level that we have at present. I mean, the stimulus funding cannot be maintained. The stimulus money is something we will have for three years or so and it will give a fantastic impetus. But from then on, there will be steady funding on a serious level.

Your area of science it's going to continue because I think you have in your family scientists. It's that true?

Yes, I think my entire family has grown as scientifically literate. My daughter is very familiar with computers and uses them in the teaching field. One of my sons is the systems operator for a scientific institution, and my youngest son has become an astro-physicist and that comes from the days, I should say the nights, in Kuwait when we could lie on the sand, look at the stars and explain them. And that interest has stayed as lifelong interest. In my family, we are able to maintain a certain scientific ambiance, but at the same time, cultural ambiance is extremely important.

I want to ask you a question about nuclear power. What do you think about that?

Yes, but you shouldn't put that down, I think, because I personally believe that we will have nuclear power, the trickiest is that we have to have save nuclear power. That's the most important part.