Marcel Meeus: "I always have been believing in zinc as potential key solution for rechargeable battery storage systems "
Marcel Meeus is attending R-Zinc as expert in several breakout sessions.
Speaker presentation:
Mr Meeus, can you tell us who you are ?
I’ve worked for more than 40 years with Umicore and the green line through all my career steps had a focus on battery materials from zinc primary to almost all rechargeable batteries. I enjoyed doing research, application and business management and together with enthusiastic teams we succeeded to become world players in all the businesses that we initiated and developed. Once retirement age reached about 5 years ago, my personal battery still had enough state-of-charge to start a second life as Consultant in my private Company Sustesco.
Why did you decide to participate to R-Zinc ?
Although being more focused now on Lithium based systems, my career started with zinc powders for batteries at Overpelt and they still are near to my heart. In the past with customers and now in the frame of European Projects, I always have been believing in zinc (as powders or ZnO) as potential key solutions for rechargeable battery storage systems and the seminar R-Zinc is a fantastic initiative to make people aware of recent realised progress and future possibilities. But there are still technical challenges to overcome.
What is your dedicated technology (Zn-Air, Zn-Ni, Zn-other, energy storage, mobility,… - if this applies) and where do you see the place of the zinc in the energy world (present and future, rechargeable or not)?
From all the rechargeable zinc-based technologies, Zn-Air is my personal favourite, not the easiest one but with the highest potential. In my consulting work for EMIRI (European Materials Industrial Research Initiative) we are currently developing a Technical Roadmap for Low Carbon Energy and Metal-Air stationary batteries for utility scale are one of the promoted technologies: challenges, work description and KPI’s by 2030 are described