Guest Speaker: Dirk Uwe Sauer
Title: Sodium-ion batteries: Performance, lifetime and cost perspective of different commercial cells with various materials and application in large scale stationary battery storage systems
Dr. Dirk Uwe Sauer works on batteries and renewable energy systems since 1992. After 11 years at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE he became a Professor for “Electrochemical Energy Conversion and Storage Systems” at RWTH Aachen University, the first chair of its kind at German Universities. He is also a PI at Helmholtz- Institute Münster (HI MS, IMD-4) at Forschungszentrum Jülich under the direction of Prof. Martin Winter and since 2022 founding director of the Center for Ageing, Reliability and Lifetime Prediction of Electrochemical and Power Electronic Systems (CARL) at RWTH Aachen University. His research focus is on storage systems in electric vehicles of any kind, and in grids with a high penetration of renewable energies. He has a holistic view on batteries including post-mortem analysis, ageing and lifetime prediction, modelling and diagnostics, impedance spectroscopy and impedance-based modelling, and energy system analysis including sector coupling. He was founding editor in chief of the “Journal of Energy Storage” (2015 – 2022) and the co-ordinator of a cluster on battery use within the German Excellent Battery Program. Dirk Uwe was also the Chair of the Board of Directors of the interdisciplinary policy advisory project of the national science academies “Energy Systems of the Future” on all aspects of the “Energiewende” for 7 years. In autumn 2025, the innovative four-semester Master’s programme ‘Battery Science and Technology in Engineering’, developed and led by Dirk Uwe, was launched. He is a member of the Germany Academy of Engineering Science acatech, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science (BBAW) and the Academy of Science and Literature Mainz.
Agenda, CET
15:00 -15:05 Intro Patrik Johansson
15:05- 15:50 Presentation “Sodium-ion batteries: Performance, lifetime and cost perspective of different commercial cells with various materials and application in large scale stationary battery storage systems” Dirk Uwe Sauer
15:50- 16:15 Q&A and Summary Patrik Johansson