High performance materials, including both functional materials and structural materials, hold the key to innovation across many energy technologies critical to national priorities in clean energy, economic growth, and environmental justice. But with ambitious national targets for a clean power sector by 2035 and a net-zero emissions energy sector by 2050, the traditional 15-20 years-to-market timeframe for materials innovations needs to be accelerated.

Toward this end, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has established the Energy Materials Network (EMN) as a community-of-practice in state-of-the-art materials research and development (R&D) specifically aimed at advancing clean energy technologies. The network comprises core consortia focused on different high-impact energy technologies, each leveraging world-class capabilities at the DOE’s National Laboratories to better integrate all phases of materials R&D, from discovery to scale-up and qualification. These consortia help facilitate stakeholder access to the National Laboratories’ capabilities, tools, and expertise to accelerate the clean-energy materials development cycle, and enable U.S. manufacturers to deliver innovative, made-in-America products for achieving our energy and environmental justice goals.

Working in collaboration with partners from the National Laboratories, industry, and academia, each consortium focuses on the R&D needs for specific classes of materials and determines their suitability to address the nation’s most pressing energy challenges.

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