The Department of Energy held a groundbreaking ceremony Thursday for a grid energy storage research and development facility at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state.

DOE said it expects the Grid Storage Launchpad to be fully operational in 2025 for scientists to experiment with new materials, components and technology prototypes intended to store electric power.

The $75 million project received investments from the state government, PNNL and the lab’s management contractor Battelle.

“Energy storage is a critical step on the path to getting more renewable power on the system, supporting a growing fleet of electric vehicles, making our grid more reliable, and securing our clean energy future. Breakthroughs at this exciting facility will help provide clean, affordable, and resilient energy to everyone, everywhere, anytime,” said Gil Bindewald, acting principal deputy assistant secretary in the DOE Office of Electricity.

Tonya Wilkerson, deputy director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and a 2022 Wash100 Award recipient, said at a recent symposium that NGA partnered with non-federal entities to develop future science, technology, engineering and math and professionals who can support the agency’s GEOINT mission.

“Specifically, NGA has worked to become more involved at the university level in the growth of STEM-based
curriculum development, with an end goal of increasing our geospatial-trained talent pool in our college-aged students,” Wilkerson told an audience at the 2022 GEOINT Symposium Sunday.

She said the agency entered into education partnership agreements with the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Harris-Stowe State University to increase STEM education opportunities for students in the region.

NGA also works with companies and universities to facilitate research and development projects as another avenue for expanding the GEOINT workforce, according to the agency’s deputy director.

Wilkerson noted that the partnerships use cooperative R&D agreements, also known as CRADA.

“It’s a superb example of a collaboration that also works to build a region-specific pipeline for future GEOINT analysts, imagery analysts, data scientists, geodesy scientists, and all kinds of other STEM experts we need,” she added.

Tonya Wilkerson and other Intelligence Community leaders are scheduled to speak at GovCon Wire’s 2nd Annual IC Acquisition and Technology Innovation Summit. Register for the May 4 event via the GovCon Wire Events page.

The Biden administration has unveiled a plan to address the threats posed by unmanned aircraft systems to homeland security, public safety and privacy.

The Domestic Counter-UAS National Action Plan offers eight recommendations, including the need to work with Congress on a bill that would expand and reauthorize counter-UAS authorities for the departments of Homeland Security, Defense, State, Justice, CIA and NASA, the White House said Monday.

The action plan proposes to come up with a list of U.S. government-authorized detection equipment to guide authorized organizations in buying UAS detection platforms, establish oversight mechanisms to support critical infrastructure operators and owners and create a national counter-UAS training center.

Other recommendations are developing a federal drone incident tracking database; establishing a process to coordinate research, development, testing and evaluation of drone detection and mitigation technology across the government; and improving cooperation on counter-UAS technologies with the international community.

An electronic warfare aircraft designed to serve as a technology demonstrator for a U.S. Army aerial intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance program took off for an operational mission in the Indo-Pacific region, the Army reported Friday.

The contractor-owned Airborne Reconnaissance and Electronic Warfare System aircraft will support processing, exploitation and dissemination operations and gather intelligence in real time within the area of responsibility of Indo-Pacific Command.

The service branch will use the data from the tech demonstration to inform future sensor requirements for the multidomain sensing system and allocate platform investments for the High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System’s future program of record.

An L3Harris Technologies-designed ARES tech demonstrator completed its maiden flight in August 2021.