See link to pdf Chairman’s report 2017.
General Assembly
Odense, March 6th, 2017
Constitution of the new board
After the General Assembly in 2016 the first task was the constitution of the new elected board. We all agreed that our focus should be on driving activities for the members, and we therefore organised the board in three teams:
Editorial team: Rasmus (Chair), Jon, Andreas
Events team: Jonathan (Chair), Søren, Andreas, Kjeld, Rasmus
Administration team: Lars, Jon, Jonathan
Lars was elected chairman of the board, and Jon treasurer
We had 7 board meetings during the year, as well as planning meetings in the Events and Editorial teams.
Editorial team
The purpose of the editorial team is to manage our home page and mailings to the members. Ongoing communication to our members about our activities as well as other kinds of knowledge sharing is obviously important to the Battery Society. Jon has been the main communicator for the Society since we started, but last year Jon should not be alone with this task, so we created the Editorial team consisting of Rasmus, Andreas and Jon.
Jon has introduced Rasmus to our home page and mailing tools, and Rasmus is now the lead person for publishing news. He can always be contacted with ideas for stories and news and links to battery related events.
Events
The largest team is the events team, and early on they made a seminar and meeting plan for the coming year.
The first event was a visit to Haldor Topsøe in July 2016. Jonathan presented the methods used at Haldor Topsøe to prepare uniform electrode coatings for very reproducible results and showed the equipment used.
The next event was a seminar on impedance spectroscopy at DTU arranged by Daniel Risskov Sørensen. The aim of the meeting was to share knowledge and experience with these measuring techniques.
Lithium Balance and DTI decided to collocate their annual battery training and energy storage seminar at DTI in Aarhus 30 Nov/1 Dec 2016. About 25 people participated in the battery training with speakers from the automotive industry. And about 40 people attended the energy storage seminar on the last day, which this time focused on thermal energy storage and grid connected batteries.
In February, the Battery Society supported the Battery degradation seminar arranged by Christian T. Veje at the Mads Clausen Institute in Sønderborg. The attendance was an impressive 40-50 people who among other things learned about the battery testing NASA go through before sending batteries into space.
Finally, a lot of effort has gone into arranging the Danish Battery Symposium 2017 at SDU here in Odense, which we have just completed today.
I think it is worth noticing that the events in the past year have covered most of the country, with meetings in Lyngby, Sønderborg, Aarhus and Odense.
Besides all the events executed in the past year, the events team has actually also already prepared a tentative events plan for 2017, so that the Battery Society will have a flying start in 2017.
This list includes the following ideas for meetings before summer:
- A meeting in cooperation with the Environmental Protection Agency about battery development, electric cars and environmental impact
- A meeting on sodium batteries
- And a meeting where we would like all electric vehicle developers in Denmark to present their projects.
In the Autumn Lithium Balance and DTI plan to repeat their annual battery training and battery seminar.
Aiming higher in the future
The Board has also discussed how the society can aim even higher in the future by arranging an international battery conference and by getting Danish companies more involved in the future.
In December, the Nordic Battery Conference 2017 will take place in Finland. This year we are very proud that Jonathan has been invited to join the scientific committee of the conference. The Battery Society has also decided to try to get the Nordic battery conference in December 2019 to Denmark, with the Battery Society as either organizer or co-organizer.
In the new year, we would like to focus on involving the Danish industry
more in the Battery Society. To achieve this, we believe it is necessary to have activities targeting the interests of companies working with batteries. This could be addressing specific topics at our sessions, but we have also approached the BG-04 ERFA group on batteries managed by Per Jørgensen-Møller, to discuss whether we could cooperate and coordinate our activities. The response has been very positive, and we will continue this dialogue with Per and the ERFA group.
Thank you
I want to conclude this Chairman’s Report by thanking my fellow board members for their outstanding effort in the past year. I truly believe the events and the knowledge sharing makes a difference, and I experience more and more, that also outsiders such as the press now contact us when they need knowledge about batteries.
Special thanks and gratitude goes to Søren Højgaard Jensen, who due to increasing workload in his other activities has decided to leave the board in connection with the election this year. Søren was our first Chairman when the Battery Society was created, and his contribution will not be forgotten.
Thank you.
Lars Barkler
Chairman of the Board
The Danish Battery Society.
